An Abominable Fancy

John Stater is the prolific creator of Blood & Treasure, Pars Fortuna, Mystery Men!, and Tales of the Space Princess. He wrote Hex Crawl Chronicles for Frog God Games, and is docmenting his own massive hex crawl setting in the magazine, NOD. He has several new projects coming out, including Tome of Monsters (for which I provided some drawings), Grit & Vigor, and a series of Basic-style iterations of Blood & Treasure designed to emulate specific fantasy genres. His blog, The Land of NOD, is a wonderful resource for gaming ideas, thought experiments, and truly peculiar character classes. What is your history as a gamer? John Stater: I began gaming in 6th grade—so about 12 years old. A friend of mine had seen his brother play Moldvay basic with some friends, and we tried to recreate the game ourselves based on his memory of what he'd seen. We probably didn't get it quite right, but I loved it and got my mother to buy me Basic D&D (from Toys 'R&#

This summer, I'm going to run a BtW campaign over on the Unseen Servant forums . Let me recruit you! Prince Valiant panel by Hal Foster If you'd like to join, register at the Unseen Servant , and go through all the standard forum rigamarole: post in the Introductions and Welcomes thread go to the Looking for Players or Games thread and find my recruitment post, helpfully titled " Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures " private message me (Pulpatoon) to get included in the game I'm looking for 5-6 players who can post more-or-less once every weekday, through the summer. It might take awhile to get all the players lined up, so don't worry if it looks like a slow start. PbP is a great way to fit role playing into your schedule, but it does mean adapting yourself to a very different pace.

A few weeks ago,  +John Stater posted a notion of making a simplified version of his admirable Blood & Treasure as a foundation to build retroclones based on the work of specific illustrators. That's an idea scientifically calibrated to pique my imagination, and I started wondering "What would D&D look like if it was based on the work of Heinrich Kley ?" I've been playing with it a bit, and it's synched up with a number of other ideas I've been noodling. Here's a rough outline of how I'm framing things: Alignments Civilized Wild Social Status Laborer Bourgeoisie/Burgher Gentry Background Wilderness Rural Urban Maritime Military Trade High Society Academia Clergy Class Soldier Sneak Spell-caster (Inventor, Spiritualist, Illusionist) Doktor Race Centaur Elefant Froschling Human Krokodiller Satyr Right now, I'm building it all on a f

I came back from vacation, and look what was waiting for me! John Stater's Blood & Treasure and the first ten issues of NOD , received in exchange for some doodles I did for Mr. Stater's forthcoming Tome of Monsters. I encountered Stater's work my first week of noodling into the OSR. The concept of the hexcrawl was kinda new to me (my formative D&D edition was Holmes Basic), and Stater has produced troves of hexcrawl resources. He stuck out particularly to my art-school eyes because of his visual sophistication ( NOD #7 has the best cover in the entire OSR). It's a massive stack of material, and I haven't had a chance to do more than skim, but man-o-pete, it is good. B&T is a wonderful system, drawing from across games and editions, and designed to be modified for your comfort, with lots of clever new considerations. I might graft race-as-class onto it and use it as my new system, or harvest huge bloody chunks of it for either B/X or Microli