The long-awaited return of Mashup Monday!

It's been a busy week, but one that has been marked by the acquisition of some new books I'm excited about reading. To celebrate, let's do another mashup exercise.

Lyuba Vinogradova's Defending the Motherland is about female Soviet fighter pilots during WWII and Werewolf Histories, edited by Willem de Blecourt, is a collection of academic papers about werewolf beliefs in (mostly?) medieval Europe. I haven't read either of them yet. Let's open them, flip through a bit, and see what we can find.

"They encountered two German motorcyclists on the road. One was busy repairing his motorcycle and the other pointed at their bundles, where, he was guessing, there would be food. Glafira was distraught, and began very slowly to untie her load, at the bottom of which there was a gun. While this was going on, Sonya pulled out her own pistol, shot the German, ran over to the other one and shot him twice at point-blank range. The women dashed into the bushes and ran away as fast as they could."

OK, that's a promising start. Let's see about the werewolf book. 

"The marginalised family Kramp fitted all too well into the image of rebellious devilish shape-shifters and most horrible villains, who had violated godly and familial order. ... No one could blame the lord of Schmidtheim for rooting out these beasts. Clearly, Reinhard the Younger had two aims: firstly, to gain sovereignty from Blankenheim, and secondly to gain lordly prerogatives in Schmidtheim."

This all sounds quite WFRP-y, or for that matter my-D&D-game-y. So in order to eliminate a family of political rivals -- or just local troublemakers who are making his life difficult -- a jumped-up local lord accuses them of being werewolves, forcing them to go on the lam. The only problem is that they actually are werewolves. Or perhaps in true classic horror-comic style they aren't werewolves, but are merely highly-trained assassins who are cutting the throats of every hapless son of a bitch waving a sprig of wolfsbane at them? If you want to use that angle, vampires is funnier.

Or maybe being accused of werewolfism is like bad-jacketing; if someone accuses you of being a werewolf, you're screwed. So screwed that the werewolves will come along and offer to "help." Either way what you get is two young daughters wandering along the side of the read with their bindles and occasionally ripping the throats out of soldiers. Works for me.

Today's old-timey acquisition

The Cambridge University Roleplaying Society has been liquidating its old library in order to buy some games that its members actually play, which is fair enough. This means that a lot of classic gaming books are being sold off. I missed out on a few bargains in the first part of the sale, so I was pleased to snap up this Deities and Demigods for a very small price.

This is not the famous one with the Cthulhu Mythos section -- they did have one of those, but they opened it up for bidding and it climbed out of my price range in moments. Still, it's nice to have this to go with the other AD&D 1st ed. books I'll never actually use. I should get a Fiend Folio if the opportunity presents itself.

Marcus Burnham, if you're out there ... 

Anyway, as you can see, back in the day the Cambridge University Roleplaying Society was called the D&D Society. 

The book itself is fascinating. I have flipped through it in the past but never really read it. I expect a lot of people first encountered a lot of these mythologies through this book -- and probably encountered some goofy ideas about them, too. But I do like how grounded the older game was in history and mythology, even quite selectively interpreted history and mythology. 

As usual, there is some 70s-type cheesecake. 

Freya's bitch-face game is on point. 

I'm not sure that is a good dog-walking outfit, Hecate. 

There are one or two dubious choices: 

That Chinese take-out font is ... oof.

But anyway, I've got one and I'm looking forward to reading it. It's been a good week for vintage gaming finds, and I'm looking forward to more!

Silent Legions: the long-awaited Part Two!

In a previous post, I began my review of Silent Legions, the Lovecraftian-horror sandbox game from Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing. I am a big fan of this type of game and its approach to worldbuilding, so I decided to put it into practice.

Pantheon and cults

Before starting to develop my setting, I created a pantheon, an alien race and some cults. I rolled for the gods and discovered that there were four of them, divided into two pantheons. One of the pantheons came up "monotheistic," so obviously that god, who I rolled as a god of fire -- the Sleeping Flame -- is the only god in its pantheon (I suppose that's not really a pantheon, then, but you know what I mean). The other pantheon has three gods, but they don't fully exist yet: I rolled "forerunners" for them, which means that they are waiting to be born into our reality. They are the Sultan of Cold, the King of Thirst and the Devourer of Pain.

So we have one god -- obviously, your passive, dormant type -- that already exists and three younger gods striving to be born. I'm guessing the Flame wants to make sure the others don't burst into our reality and displace it.

My alien race don't have a name yet, but the dice tell me that they've only been here for one to two hundred years and that they're capable of disguising themselves as humans. During their time on earth, they've created a concealed global network of underground structures to house themselves, and obviously one of these is located in the area where I'm going to set my game. They came to earth from another part of our solar system, and they use humans to incubate their larvae. They influenced astronomy -- I'm assuming to conceal the existence of their home -- until a group of humans banded together to stop them. I'll have to find somewhere discovered in the last few centuries to have them come from; Pluto is probably too predictable.

They fear the outer gods -- I decided to have this mean that they fear the new, yet-to-be-born gods. Perhaps they fled from their home to seek refuge from them?

They live within the human community, and they have the power of mind control, which they use to suborn the local government; they produce or have access to some kind of addictive substance they use to manipulate people. They place the highest value on reproduction -- I wonder if maybe they are dying out back home. In their normal physical form (when not impersonating humans) they are like half-intangible clouds with stalked eyes projecting from them. Their behaviour is ant-like; they have a queen and they obey her unquestioningly. They speak in airy, breathy voices, eat by liquefying and absorbing their food and seem to be motionless until they suddenly move with inconceivable speed.

When they die, they erupt into a swarm of immature larvae which will seek to burrow themselves into a human host. They won't mature, but they can do some damage.

By Luigi Castellani. 

I rolled up one cult, the Circle of the Iron Demiurge. They were founded in ancient history by an artist who received bizarre visions of something huge. They took control of a community in ancient history, recruiting their numbers from among artists; they infiltrated an existing faith and repurposed some of its temples, but they were opposed by a rival faith.

Today, they have embraced their uncontrollable artistic visions to the point that many of them are incapable of functioning in normal society. Each member has a hidden tattoo which they use to identify themselves; the cult is bounded together by a twisted form of familial love. The leader is a mad high priest, but he has possibly untrustworthy second-in-command. The cult wants revenge against someone -- maybe the descendants of the religion that fought them in antiquity? They are masters of diabolical sorcery, which is their chief weapon.

Here are the three major and three minor characters I created for the cult:

• Seductive femme fatale
• Merciless crime boss
• Monstrous entity that resembles a human -- maybe one of the alien species has switched sides to work for the unborn gods rather than the Flame? 
• Foolish street thug with grandiose plans
• Sweet old lady carrying on a hideous family tradition
• Ambitious young academic seeking cult secrets

The second cult I didn't bother rolling up; the alien race description made it clear that the other cult in the mix was going to be the mind-controlled slaves of the aliens. I assume they work in tiers with actual shape-shifted aliens at the top and the addicted thralls at the bottom. 

Basically all of this was generated randomly, I want to point out, and it all fits together into quite a nice little antagonist group. Certainly much more detail than I would probably have created in an hour of just thinking about it. And more importantly, not solely the kind of thing I would think of (and therefore the kind of thing my players would be able to predict). 

Locations

I decided to set my campaign right here in Cambridgeshire. The book recommends picking three urban locations, three rural locations and three remote locations, some of which are to be "red herrings," ie locations with no occult tag. I only did eight instead of nine. My locations were: 

• Cambridge (city)
• Cambridge (university)
• Ely
• Little Stukeley (red herring)
• Westley Waterless
• Ramsey Forty Foot
• Ouse Washes
• Gallows Hill

For each of these locations, you generate two tags, each of which contains an enemy, a friend, a scheme, a secret and a place. You pick these from a list of suggestions for each one. 

Cambridge City: Foul Faith. A local religion has been corrupted. Enemy: popular demagogue. Friend: concerned relative. Scheme: consecrate a place with an evil rite. Secret: the religion supports social services for the needy, despite its evil nature. Place: secret fane in important building. 

Crushing Despair. The people of Cambridge have lost hope in things ever getting better. Enemy: political machine boss. Friend: Successful expat returning home. Scheme: discredit source of hope. Secret: Constant plans for renewal always disappoint. Place: street with half the houses empty. 

This is an example of a location and its tags; I'm not going to type them all out because there's nine of them, so here's the summary. 

Ely: Horrific Wealth, Creeping Plague. Ely's privileged residents have some corrupt secret behind their wealth -- but can even that save them from the contagion that's about to break out? Are they, in fact, linked? 

Cambridge University: Drug Epidemic, Damnable Saviour. A new designer drug is doing the rounds among students -- it's even being made by students. But the drug has side effects that one of the cults is keen to harness or put a stop to. A wealthy patron tries to battle the problem, but has secrets of her own. 

Little Stukeley: Clannish Silence, Old Grudges. Stukeleians (is that a word?) don't trust outsiders, and anyone who tries to tell people about what's going on gets put down by the brutal clan leaders. Two factions within the village fight, with an unscrupulous gun runner selling to both sides. 

Westley Waterless: Senseless Violence, Buried Power. A local archaeological site has a hidden being beneath it -- a zealous young archaeologist struggles with the local landowner for access. Does the site have something to do with the bizarre rash of violent crimes in the area? 

Ramsey Forty Foot: Depraved Clergy, Entrenched Poverty. In this poor village, a violent strain of old-timey witch-hunting religion has arisen. 

Ouse Washes: Poisoned Ground, Inhuman Masters. Chemical spills are contaminating the area -- they come from a hidden lab run by a rogue scientist. Is it tied in to the aliens' attempt to create a device to communicate with their offworld allies? 

Gallows Hill: Hateful Tradition, Predator Entity. Bigoted locals enact a cruel local rite believed to appease an evil spirit. There is an evil spirit -- but it isn't appeased. Bodies of the locals' victims are believed to be consumed by the monster, but in fact it eats something less substantial -- a part of the soul, or the sanity. 

It's spookier if you know it's called the Devil's Dyke. 

So there you have it -- that's probably a year's worth of sessions, although they're not all developed, and it took me about two hours while watching television. And as you can see, they're not necessarily Mythos-y; the plot concepts are sufficiently broad that they can fit anywhere. I like enough of these plots that I may well use them, and several of them are not what I would have thought of without using the generator. I particularly love the aliens, the cult, all that stuff. 

There are lots of tools for me to quickly create the next steps as well -- I'd start with this level plus local knowledge, improvisation and charm, and then when the players wanted to actually go somewhere in the sandbox I'd quickly whip up the relevant spells, critters, artefacts and so on. Probably the only thing I'd do more of in advance is the cult's sorcery; given that it's important to them I would want to make sure I had some strongly-established visuals and names to act as clues. 

By Luigi Castellani.

I have discovered my first flaw in the game, though! Well, it's not a flaw per se, more like a caveat; it's just that the tags will require a little adjustment to make them work in a wainscot UK setting (rather than a World-of-Darkness-type setting), and of course they'll need even more fiddling to make fit a specific city. The second point is true anywhere; Cambridge is filthy rich; that's its problem, and the idea of a street with empty houses, rather than people paying £200K to live in a shoebox and be beaten with rods, is risible. But I'm the one that chose it; I was shooting for a more WoD-y concept anyway. And that would be true anywhere; a tag that makes sense one way in New York needs a little work to make sense in Muscatine. 

The national point is a little more an artefact of the game itself; it's set in America, and some of the tags reflect that, assuming that guns are everywhere and there's lots of murders and so on. I struggled with fitting some of the tags to really remote locations, also; if I were to do this again I think I would make it a big city and not bother with the remote country stuff; I'd make "village" the lowest level of resolution, rather than somewhere really out in the middle of nowhere. Mind you, I think that some of the crime assumptions would work OK in London or even somewhere like Birmingham or Glasgow or somewhere; you can believe that film-noir stuff in a way that's hard to believe about Cambridge. So maybe my home is just weird. 

I hope this has given you an example of how the sandbox generation works and why I think this game is so great; I'm not rolling to see how many of this or what type of columns are in the lobby or what kind of guns the thugs have. I'm rolling for the narrative elements, and then I'm fitting it all together like some mad game of Iron Chef. You can see how useful this is for modern-horror setting creation. Honestly, it should be in every World of Darkness ST's tool kit; that's probably the closest thing on the market to a modern horror sandbox, and it lacks anything like this, at least as far as I know. 

Seriously, you guys; if you run any kind of modern horror game, get this one. Link's at the top of the post. 

Swag Roundup: Ravening Hordes

I mentioned earlier that my vacation has involved a certain amount of game-product shopping, largely at the gaming flea market at Game Kastle in Santa Clara but also at local used bookshops and gaming stores. Here are just a few of the things I acquired:

Technically, I bought the Bones miniatures back in 2013. And there's more that isn't on here!

Today I want to talk about one of these acquisition's, 1987's Ravening Hordes.

This supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Battle (second edition) is sort of the birth of the modern fantasy wargame, in the sense that it is a big pile of army lists, with lots of different characters and war machines and creatures with special rules -- up to that point, it was very much the case that you just put whatever the heck you liked in your Warhammer army. Here we see the movement toward the competitive game, even the tournament. Obviously that formula would be even more refined in 3rd edition with Warhammer Armies, but at least to my untrained eye Ravening Hordes looks very much like the bridge between 2nd and 3rd editions.

Others, I'm sure, have said better things about Ravening Hordes, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I did want to draw attention to a few things:

The differences between this edition and the Warhammer I played (4th-6th editions) are interesting, as are the similarities. A lot of the iconic troop types are present: Fanatics, Flagellants, Witch Elves, Knights Panther, and what have you. But there are also a lot of things that are clearly sort of left over from Warhammer's D&D and Tolkien roots, like half-orcs. The Empire is clearly much more medieval than it would wind up being (although it does have a lot of gunpowder weapons), the whole Ulthuan/Khaine mythology doesn't exist yet, but the Skaven are almost exactly the Skaven of later editions, right down to the names of the clans and the many and weird special weapons.

The Beastmen are showing their roots, too. Check out this illustration from the Chaos army list:

Look at the glyphs on the rock the Beastman is standing on: those are the Gloranthan runes for Somethingorother (it looks like an Earth glyph with a missing lower bar? Someone want to help me out?), Storm and Harmony. If it is an Earth glyph, it seems like "the wedding of Orlanth and Ernalda," a sadly ironic image to juxtapose with what this creature obviously is, a Broo. 

The book also came with a flier advertising packaged armies in conformity with the rules in the book. The cheapest one is a Dark Elf army -- that's 123 models for £55.00. According to this site, that's approximately £141 in today's money, which is still a pretty good deal for 123 figures. The most expensive is 274 models for £120, or £307 in today's money. I think that's probably feasible, possibly feasible even in metal, but not perhaps feasible from GW. I may try to do this as an exercise at some point in the future. 

It was fun reading Ravening Hordes, but I doubt I'll hold onto it -- I have a copy of 3rd edition, so if I'm going to play the game I should probably hold out for Warhammer Armies. 

Swipe File Special: Master Li and Number Ten Ox

I am, as I have mentioned, on holiday at the moment, and that means holiday reading. One of the things I've been reading, or more accurately rereading, is The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart. I first read the first of these novels, Bridge of Birds, in high school, where it was recommended to me by an English teacher. I read the others over the years, although I don't think that they're as good as the original (they're a bit predictable).

The setting is kind of a fantasy Tang Dynasty China, with its own weird history and all kinds of goofy exaggeration, much more the China that appears in kung fu movies than any actual part of Chinese history. Master Li is a goofy old Taoist sage who works as a detective, and Number Ten Ox, our narrator, is his good-hearted Watson. The books are good, but if you wanted to say there was a certain amount of corny Orientalism (or Chinoiserie) in them I wouldn't disagree. There are definitely some flaws there.

But what I wanted to talk about today is the number of dungeons there are in the first two books, Bridge of Birds and Story of the Stone.

In Bridge of Birds, we have a baddy who lives in a castle over an underground labyrinth, with secret instructions to find the cache of treasure in it. Once Li and Ox find the clue there, they head off to two other dungeons, one of them an island puzzle where they're being chased around by a sort of giant invisible monster and one of them a network of caves full of traps and evil monks. Then they go back to the first dungeon and attack it from a different perspective.

Story of the Stone is much more centred on a single location, in this case a valley where a long-dead madman is believed to have returned to do all kind of evil stuff. And seriously like a quarter of the book is these guys exploring the dungeon -- going through it, hearing local legends about it from the people in the valley, entering it at different times through different entrances, finding how its various areas link up to each other, looking for clues, interpreting information, fighting, running like hell, discovering deeper areas, the whole bit. It is a really richly-described dungeon exploration in novel form, and if you like that sort of thing it's really worth checking out.

Quite apart from it being a pretty good book, of course.

Dragonmeet, Red and Pleasant Land

Despite having lived in the UK for over a decade on the current stretch, I had never been to a Dragonmeet until this past weekend. This year I went partly off my own bat and partly as a volunteer for Isles of Darkness, a live gaming society I'm part of. I didn't get to do any actual gaming, but I got to meet and talk to people, to see some cool new games, to sell a few things in the Bring & Buy and to buy some things I wanted, so I was happy with the experience.

My photo of our booth came out blurry, but this was the view from it. 

I believe they were reporting about 1,500 people through the door, which was more than in previous years. Certainly the trade hall seemed to be doing a lively business and the lines for tickets were long. I thought the venue was good, although for some reason it was really difficult to get into the car park.

I'm going to do this post in two parts. First, brief list of cool stuff in no particular order:

• It was nice to briefly meet Dave Chapman, whose "RPG a Day" blog series helped energise me to think about gaming in general again. 
• I got to see some friends I rarely see. 
• Live recording of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff was lots of fun, and featured a complete campaign idea generated within a few minutes. I wonder if the hosts' lists of un-run campaigns are as long and frustrating as mine. 
• Response to IoD booth was very positive. I hope that this is a trend for us, both in improving our outreach and in making our games more accessible to new players. 
• I got a cute little notebook from Squarehex; the sheets have graph paper on one side and lined paper on the other, so when you open it you've got a map on the left side and the key on the right. It's A6, so it's more going to be groups of dungeon rooms than whole dungeons, but that's OK by me. Also they are currently Kickstarting an A5 version, which has just hit its goal. If I hadn't got one for myself, that A6 would have made a great stocking stuffer for me. 
• I picked up a copy of Maelstrom: Domesday, a variant of Maelstrom set in the 11th century -- which is to say a game that might as well have had "play this, James Holloway" written on the cover. Expect a full review once I've finished reading it. Both the original and the new version are available on DriveThru (and currently on sale!) from Arion Games. I am pretty excited about this; from what I saw of it, it looks like exactly my thing, and it's clear the creator likes a lot of the same things I like (game designers come from the oddest backgrounds; this guy's an immunologist). Will it live up to the excitement? Come back next time to find out!
• I also got a copy of Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne, a little story game about, well, witch burnings. I'm not sure it's medieval history per se, but again, grubby middle ages seemed to be a thing for me this year. Again, I'll review that when I get the chance. 

But the big purchase for me was Red and Pleasant Land, Zak S's latest offering for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG (although effectively for D&D in any of its many incarnations). This thing is ... man. It is pretty good. And it's pretty. It's hardbound, but with -- is it called a cloth binding? That sort of textured cloth cover rather than the usual glossy binding you get in RPGs. It's got a bound-in red bookmark. More than anything else, it looks like a book of fairy tales. I mean, exactly, to the point where I wonder if this is a coincidence. 

Hans Christian Andersen for visual comparison, little Skaven for size comparison. 

And it looks gorgeous inside as well; lovely soft heavy paper, intelligent and tasteful use of colour. It makes most full-colour rulebooks look like some old bullshit.  

Initially, this made me want to tear up all my dungeon maps, but now it just makes me want to make some new ones. 

Continuing the Vornheim trend of printing right inside the cover. 

Lots of new monsters. 

OK, so it looks terrific. What's it about? RPL is basically a setting guide to a place called Voivodja, otherwise The Place of Unreason, a land where the rules of conventional reality are treated with a certain levity. The land was once entirely covered by the palace of a mad king, but now his gardens grow wild over it and the ruins of the palace form a substrate of "interiors" (ie dungeons) under it. Rival armies of vampires, each one of them with its own goofy-yet-creepy character, strive for mastery, so you've got plenty of plots, alliances, battles, intrigues, covert missions, hidden agendas, all that kind of thing. As I'd come to expect from Zak S's previous book, Vornheim, you not only get examples of these but lots of good ways to generate them on the fly. I am a big fan of the randomly-generated Intercepted Communique Table. 

Voivodja is basically a mashup of Alice in Wonderland and vampires, which doesn't sound like a combination that would work but does. I think this is because vampires, at least in many vampire stories, are sort of petty and obsessive in the same way that the characters in the Alice stories are. I mean, a mad monarch who lives in the ruined splendour of a crumbling palace, pursuing ever more cruel and recondite pleasures while everything falls to chaos around her ... that's either a vampire or an Alice character, depending on which angle you look at it from, right? And RPL succeeds in looking at the thing from both angles simultaneously, not 100% perfectly -- there were one or two moments where a piece of either straight whimsy or straight horror felt a little out-of-place to me -- but pretty close. 

I mentioned Vornheim, which I'm a big fan of, and this is definitely similar in some ways, but it's much more worked-out and detailed -- Vornheim was packed with usable stuff, but this is just so much larger. Let's look at what's in here: 

• A guide to the setting, including not just places but customs, including weddings, a duelling code and how to act like a weird homicidal Alice character. 
• A whole new character class, the Alice or Fool, with a random level-up table and a new ability, Exasperation. 
• 47 monsters, including a shit-hot random demon (or "Guest" as they're known in Voivodja) generation table that reminds one strongly of Realms of Chaos. 
• Two good-sized dungeons, being the headquarters of the two main antagonists. Making two whimsical-vampire-monarch's-castle dungeons different from each other is no mean feat!
• Some maps of sample locations, showing each of the setting's three main terrain types. 
• Systems for running duels, large battles and characters with social rank. 
• A shedload of random tables, including location generators, adventure hooks, an "I Search the Body" table and a way of determining where characters who missed a session have been. 
• Player handouts, including a fragmentary map for one of the dungeons. 

So I was reading this at the con and lamenting that although it's great, my own D&D game is more of a mud-'n'-blood, scoundrels-on-the-run sort of a thing and I'd find it hard to put something as out there as this book into it without it seeming like a jarring transition. The person I was talking to pointed out that what this setting sounded like, with its mad monarchs and weird creatures and gardens run amok, was the Hedge from Changeling: the Lost. And it is. In fact, I think it would contain a heck of a lot of good material, not just to lift whole but as an inspiration for constructing a local Hedge guide. 

I'm going to get some use out of this -- I can already see the bits I'm going to swipe -- but mainly it's just inspiring me to try to do something as good within the idiom of my game as this is good within its own. 

The swipe file: Cairo edition!

As I have mentioned, I was in London last weekend. Among the cheap books I picked up was a copy of Cairo, a one-volume hardcover graphic novel written by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by M. K. Perker. I remembered having enjoyed some of Wilson's writing on the web (I have a notion that I was introduced to her by the Girl Wonder site, but I don't recall), but I didn't remember that she's writing the new Ms. Marvel series, which I ought to check out.

So, Cairo is ... OK. I would say that it is better in its concept than in its execution. All the elements of the story are fun: gangsters! Wizards! Jinn! Other dimensions! Reforming journalists! Stoned camels! Sadly, the way it's written is not as great.  It's very "as you know, Bob" talky sometimes, but I think my main problem with it is just that the story is too crowded. It has six main characters, five of whom undergo some kind of life-changing experience. But it doesn't have enough room to explore those, so they come off feeling kind of rushed. When we meet Lebanese-American traveller Shaheed, he seems like a cheerful friendly guy -- although we learn he has a dark secret. But no sooner does the secret come out than he has some big experiences that effectively change every single thing about his life. That's fine and all, but we barely knew him before, so it's hard to feel like the transformation has any weight.

At other times, the plot feels predictable because of its rushedness. For instance, when streetwise smuggler Ashraf and tough-but-principled special forces soldier Tova meet, you instantly think "gee, I wonder if these two are going to fall in love despite the vast differences that separate them."

(Cairo came out in like 2007, so a) it is obviously set in a very different Egypt, and b) the consensus seems to be that Wilson has tackled those problems.)

So Cairo the actual story is not as good as Cairo the modern 1,001-Nights fantasy concept. But that's OK! It was still a fun read, and on this blog we have a very special place for books that are full of good ideas but don't necessarily cohere as single works of art. And that place is: The Swipe File! Let's do this:

• People grow an intoxicating drug in the wilderness. Animals graze on it and wander around high. 
• "The jinn have a right to the empty places."
• A wounded soldier accidentally strays into enemy(?) territory. 
• "How is life as a wandering mystic?"
• "There is another river beneath the Nile and it flows backwards."
• A randomly-looted item turns out to be the important McGuffin. 
• Water drips upward (fine, Prince of Darkness, but it's still cool). 
• Jinn can fuck with probability, but they can't make anything because that's God's deal. 
• A door within a labyrinth is visible only to some. 
• "I am Nar, well-dressed drug lord and magician."
• Knowledge of mythology and tradition allows explorers to intuit the dungeon map. 
• "The wanderer who knocks in the cold hour before dawn, keeper of small horrors and subduer of great ones." That is a pretty good demon name. 

So there you go. Inspiration is everywhere, and I definitely got my £1.95 worth out of this book. And even though I wasn't totally thrilled with it, I will definitely check out that Ms Marvel run to see how the author tackles a superhero character. 

Oh the frugality!

I was in London this weekend. Watch my other blog for what I did there, but I also made some gaming - related purchases. For instance, in the Oxfam book shop near Turnham Green tube station I picked up Day's Tolkien Bestiary for £2.99!

Despite the name, this is not really a bestiary but a massive illustrated encyclopaedia of Middle-Earth, with art by British fantasy greats including John Blanche and Ian Miller. I loves me some Ian Miller art. Also Victor Ambrus,  who in my mind is not really a fantasy illustrator but a historical guy. Perhaps I only think that because of Time Team.

Anyway,  it is pretty cool. Regarde!

Blanche does love those bridgey things. 

I think Miller is the MVP in this book. His big scenes are just so ... Ian-Miller-y.

Ambrus's work always looks like reconstruction illustration to me -- just of a thing that never existed in this case. 

And there are timelines and charts and so on.

£2.99!

RPG a Day, Day 22: Man the bargain hunter

So tomorrow I am going to London, and one of the things I am most excited about doing, apart from all the great bookshops and museums and so on, is going to this tiny model shop in Ealing:

I'm going to buy something for the sake of being a good customer -- I can always get some modelling materials even if they don't have anything I specifically want -- but really what I like the most is the fun of bargain hunting. You never know what you're going to find! I've actually been much more successful in the miniatures field than in RPGS; my collection of Rogue Trader era rarities doesn't mean I was picking up weird Adeptus Mechanicus models when I was 9, it just means I am assiduous in my searching of flea markets, car boot sales and of course the internet. 

But that's not to say I haven't found a few cool things second-hand in the RPG world, mainly thanks to my old games shop having a good used shelf but also thanks to the various online communities I'm part of. 

                                    

Notes:

Now, as you might expect, most of the games I talk about in my second-hand post are out of print, but not all of them. 

You can't find this specific Glorantha book, but Design Mechanism has some other ones, including many for $1. Those are only a fraction of the many books out there, I'm just saying that they're from the same era as the one I mention in this post. 

And of course Reign is still available. And if you just want the leading-large-groups rules and not the setting, you can get the Enchiridion.

More info on the upcoming new version of King of Sartar.

RPG a Day, Day 17: Laugh, clown, laugh.

Today I'm going to talk about the funniest game I've run. Despite what you might think, it's not Paranoia. If you know me, you might know what it is ...

Notes:

You can get the Dying Earth RPG on Drivethru. The update to the rules is the Revivification Folio. You can also get the book in the traditional format. And you should read the original stories

Somehow I failed to mention that a) of course, the Dying Earth stories are where the D&D magic system comes from, more or less, and b) that one of my favourite things about Paranoia is that its definitive artist and I have the same name. He even once sent me an email headed "evil clone must die!"

RPG a Day, Day 14: Vast is the grey maze ...

A book I like.

I don't go to a lot of cons, but I sort of feel like I want to get back into the habit again. Today I talk about a book I really like, and try to fend off talking about a thing I can't ignore but don't want to get dragged into.

I have used both the "I search the body" table and the NPC generator a lot in my game, the floorplan thing once or twice, and a couple of the monsters to memorable effect.

Notes:

You can still get Vornheim in PDF. A second print version may be in the works in future.

RPG a Day, Day 13: A Mound of My Slain

I seldom play characters, and they seldom die. So today I'm going to talk about the most memorable character death in a game I ran. In addition to this one, it's also worth noting that in my Unknown Armies game, "Rose Crescent," which you can read more about on the blog of one of the people who played in it, I sort-of kind-of killed the whole party, but only in a kind of abstract sense.

Notes:

You can buy Vornheim here.

I didn't put in the link like I said I was going to, so here it is: Day 14 is "favourite convention game." Come back tomorrow!

RPG a Day, Day 11: Hopping mentile

I would write a lengthy post about the weirdest game I own, but I already wrote seven of them. What could it be but Raven c.s. McCracken's The World of Synnibarr, which is just ... charmingly demented. It's like every 12-year-old's fantasy game expanded to bullet-stopper length with a focus and intensity that your typical 12-year-old lacks. It's got everything: 

Bitchin' jet cycles!

Mac cartography!

Raccoons with bazookas!

Mutant ... dwarf ... hammer ... whatever guys!

Conan knock-offs!

Class! 

Read my posts about it if you don't believe me. It's a pip.

RPG a Day, Day 10: Who comes this way, to a place that is not allowed to everyone?

Most game fiction isn't very good. Actually, that's not fair. Most game fiction is fine in terms of what it's meant to do, but very little game fiction is very good. But the piece of gaming fiction I am going to talk about today is, at least to my mind, spectacularly good. And unlike a lot of gaming fiction, it's the fact that it's based in a gaming setting that is this book's greatest strength (I think; again, I think there are some alternative interpretations).

Once, when I was 15, I went to a con with my brother and our friend Bernie, and I was hanging around the Chaosium booth coveting things when Greg Stafford, of all people, roped us into a game of a new edition of Nomad Gods which was being playtested. Even though I was a 15-year-old know-it-all, he was very cool to us. I was not at all into Glorantha then and just bluffed based on what I had read in Lawrence Schick's book, but he was patient and cool.

I remember nothing about the game, but I don't think that edition ever came out.

Notes:

I did a little jump of happiness when I heard that Moon Design was doing a new version of King of Sartar. I am going to get their Argan Argar Atlas and Guide to Glorantha just as soon as I've got an extra £120 lying around. So it might be a while then.

King of Dragon Pass is amazing. You can buy the original version on Good Old Games for $6, or get the recent iOS version for £7. I also did a little jump of happiness when I found out that there is a version coming out for Android very shortly. I'm serious that this is a great game, but you don't have to take my word for it. There are great reviews of it all over the internet.

RPG a Day, Day 7: How much falutin'? High.

I found the Day 7 question -- "intellectual" RPG -- a little curious. Obviously, RPGs are a bit of an intellectual pastime anyway (as opposed to, say, a physical one), but I don't think that's what it meant. I think it meant something like "the most highfalutin' RPG you own."

This is a subject that seems pretty contentious among gamers. Even talking about the subject of "intellectual" or "artistic" RPGs introduces the risk of pompous auto-back-patting on one hand or derpy Philistinism on the other. I hope I steer between the two extremes; a lot of the games I love are based on doing straightforward adventure fiction (although they aren't as derpy as people tend to assume, for more of which see below), but I put in my time in the indie-gaming trenches. I wrote a 24-hour RPG, and I won twenty-five bucks for so doing, and then I kind of forgot all about it. Sorry, Ron. (It's totally incomplete, and even if it were complete I doubt it would be any good. Me writing narrative games is real square-peg-in-round-hole stuff.) 

Anyhow. 

In the video, I kind of make it sound like the indie RPG thing ended in like 2008, which is totally untrue; that's just when I started to get out of it. Lots of cool stuff is still coming out of that movement, and in fact I've talked about some of those games previously on this blog. I'm perfectly happy to be a consumer of those games, but keeping up with the upcoming stuff and the new releases and so on proved too difficult for me. And my strengths never lay in game design. I'm not a rulesy thinker. Perhaps that's why old school gaming and Gloranthaphile setting-nerdery both appeal to me so much. 

Speaking of setting-nerdery, there's some of that coming up in today's video.

As a further point, I am not at all sure that our perception of games as "intellectual" or not is accurate. I mean, I think most people think of D&D and its heirs as the action-movie bros of the gaming world, focused on thrills and spills and less concerned about, I dunno, feelings or whatever. But I think that's probably a mistake. Go back and look at the old school blogs I linked to yesterday. Sure, Jeff likes broad comedy in his blog, but read it for a bit and you will see that he's a very smart, educated guy. And does Middenmurk look like the blog of someone who's just in it for uncomplicated action? 

Perhaps what I'm saying is that we may be confusing games that tolerate a broad range of play styles and therefore can be played in a lighthearted, undemanding way with games that have to be played that way (like World of Synnibarr or whatever). 

Lastly, one subject I don't touch on is that games have always been educational for me. The first time I ever heard about the Shahnameh was from Gary Gygax. The first time I ever encountered the myths of the Popol Vuh was in a TMNT supplement. How many of us gleaned the basics of Sumerian religion from Deities and Demigods? My examples are mostly legend and myth, but there's a lot more. Oh, games don't teach good history or good science or whatever, but hopefully what they do is sort of ... limn the edges of larger subjects and entice people who are motivated by that sense of incompleteness to check them out. Or that might just be me. 

Notes:

I have previously reviewed Mythic Iceland. You can buy it at, you guessed it, DTRPG. 

The updated version of De Profundis is just over £5, so that's going on my to-buy pile. What the hell. 

There is also a new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It is also very inexpensive. 

Dogs in the Vineyard is great. There's also a bundle of a bunch of lumpley games on there; check 'em out. My old PbP is still online all these years later, although you may need to be an RPGnet member to read it. 

And you can get My Life With Master pretty easily too. 

I know a bunch of you guys are Monsterhearts fans. Same guy did Ribbon Drive. You can get it in PDF, although it isn't as cool without the DVD-case thing, at least to me. 

RPG a Day, Day 6: Unplayed but not unloved

You have them. Don't lie to me. Everyone's got them. A shelf (or a hard drive) full of games you've never played. For most of them, it's no big deal. These are games that were found wanting, games you've never really been that keen on playing. You bought them because your friend was going to run a game, or because you thought it was going to be different, or because you feel guilty walking out of games shops without buying anything.

Sometimes I think that the whole industry runs on these games. If we only bought games we were actually playing, could anyone make a living?

Whatever. The important thing is that

 there are a few that are different; games that you really like and yet, somehow, you've just never got around to playing or running. Shelf queens. I have some too. Here are two that are really good.

Notes:

You can get Trail of Cthulhu easily, in PDF or in print.

Spaceship Zero isn't on DTRPG, although weirdly a supplement is, but you can order it direct from Green Ronin or by the usual method.

And of course there's the album, which you can get in either CD or electronic format.



Alhough I'm more of a Man ... or ASTRO-Man? ... er ... man for this game, somehow.

RPG a Day, Day 5: Kicking it old school

What is the most "old school" game I own? Hmmm. I have made, as usual, a video, so let's start with that:

As I said, there's no one guide to what constitutes "old school," but it's worth checking out Matthew Finch's Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. By the standards it lays out, some of the games I discuss aren't old school, but whatever. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Finch's retroclone, Swords and Wizardry, is free, so you might as well check it out. Honestly, if you're interested in old-school games, it isn't hard to find free stuff online, because for many people this is a labour of love, not a business, and there are lots of great blogs as well. In fact, there are too many to name, so let me just single out Jeff's Gameblog and Middenmurk as excellent ones, with very distinctive, individual takes on old school gaming. Not so much introductory blogs as two examples of what people do with the material.

Marvel Super Heroes material is relatively easy to find on eBay and elsewhere. Indeed, a less scrupulously law-abiding man than I might suggest that practically everything ever written for the game is also easily available online without having to go to dodgy torrent sites and no one seems to care, possibly because TSR is dead and gone and Marvel's got bigger problems, like where to put all their money.

Call of Cthulhu is, of course, easy to find in print and in PDF, and if you don't have it, you're really missing out on one of the great RPGs.

RPG a Day, Day 4: Recent purchases

Today I've made a short video talking about my most recent gaming acquisitions.

Notes: 

You can buy Skull and Bones in PDF at DrivethruRPG. Or you can buy it in print.

Similarly, Forgive Us is like a fiver in PDF. I wrote a longer review of it a while back..

Tin Man Games do Fighting Fantasy apps for mobile devices.

I forgot Ian Sturrock when mentioning the people who did Skull and Bones!

Also, it occurs to me that Skull and Bones would combine very well with Call of Cthulhu d20.

Here is the post about Maelstrom I mentioned. Also, turns out the game is, you guessed it, on DTRPG for $10 US (about £6).

RPG a Day, Day 3: The first game I ever bought

In today's RPG a Day post, we'll be taking a look at the first game I ever owned, a classic of 80s game design that I feel still holds up pretty well today. Check out the video to find out more about it:

Notes:

• Sadly, Erick Wujcik passed away in 2008. 
• I checked Amazon for used TMNT books and whooee. Road Hogs is pretty reasonable, though.
• Oh! Here's some good news! It looks like Palladium stopped publishing TMNT but maintained the After the Bomb line with a new rulebook, which I guess has all the animals from the original core line. As a result, all the supplements are still available as inexpensive PDFs or in print. Get. In. Of course, there's only two I don't have, but still!
• One of my fondest memories is of my dad bewilderedly trying to play one of the scenarios from Guide to the Universe with me and my brother. He had no idea what was going on (nor did we, of course) and he disapproved of all the violence, but he tried, God bless him.