An Abominable Fancy

Oh my goodness.  +Chris McDowall 's Into the Odd is the business. Personal gaming context: I've been thinking up some campaign possibilities for a gaming group. One of the notions I've been playing with is a dungeoncrawl. The setting for the dungeoncrawl is the modern world. Players can equip themselves with anything you'd find on Amazon, or at Home Depot, or from some weirdo internet swordsmith. The PCs live in a city (I've been thinking I'd make up a forgotten borough of NYC). Of course, the city is sitting on top of a megadungeon. The gist: There are secret urban spelunking clubs. Most of the wealthy families in town can be traced back to an ancestor who was in a club. The Borough President is intent on stopping the clubs, and closing up any passages to the Underworld that are discovered. The Municipal Sewer Authority is rich and powerful and unruly. The deeper you go, the less technology works, and the more mythic things become. Be nice to the rats, b

Inspired by a Lulu coupon, I did a little shopping. Old School Adventures™ Accessory CC1: Creature Compendium by Richard LeBlanc 92 pages, $10.96 I didn't especially feel the need for a monster manual— what's easier than making up a monster? But I wanted to have one lying around for the kid to pore over— what's more inspiring than a bunch of monsters?  This has certainly done the job. The kid has been writing up little adventures since he first saw this book. It's a beautifully organized book. There is a full page at the beginning that clearly explains every statistic and notation you'll find anywhere else, all monsters are fully stat'ed for 0e and B/X, there are complete treasure tables in the back, and an index of XP values calculated for no less than six different OSR editions. And every entry is illustrated, which, really, is the sine qua non of monster manuals. The book is presented with the assumption that you have a more standard monster man

I love to read and fiddle and hack all sorts of different rule sets. But the game I actually play is Beyond the Wall. It’s pretty great. Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures is set up for quick, low-prep games. You can sit down with your friends and some dice, and soon have rounded, interrelated characters, a detailed-enough base Village, and an adventure knocking down the door. There’s no reason to limit such an appealing system to one-shot sessions. And a big new supplement is here to take the strategies that worked so well in Beyond the Wall and apply them to long-term campaign play: Further Afield. I want to go to there. I’ve been playtesting Further Afield content for several months. Here’s my take: Collaborative Sandbox Design Beyond the Wall makes play out of chargen, generating not only character abilities and history, but also relationships, significant NPCs, and the Village that serves as the base. Further Afield uses this same collaborative approach to

One of the first gaming blogs I stumbled across when renewing my familiarity with the hobby was Jason Scholtis' The Dungeon Dozen . If you're not following it, then please allow me to introduce you to your favorite new thing! Scholtis writ es "... flavor-rich yet detail-free idea stimulation for fantasy RPGs in the form of random tables for the underused 12-sided die."  Occasionally , these dip into the actually-useful, but for the most part, Scholtis is creating a new literary form—poems of dehydrated weirdness strung together by the idea of random generation more than the practice. They are great fun to read, and an inspiration. I don't know how many times I've read a single entry on one of these tables and thought "There's a whole scenario/campaign/multi-generational mega-plot right there."  You don't roll these tables. You read them and then you dream better dreams. But don't take my word for it: Disastrous/Abandoned Proje

Because I'm a super-brilliant genius, I seem to have erased this really long review I wrote this morning. So, the $0.02 version: It's good! Don't let the desktop-publishing aesthetic keep your from spending eight bucks on it. There's some really great innovations here that are built of a clean, simple D&D core. Namely: Character Generation that also generates character history and setting locations and NPCs! Nearly no-prep scenarios that provide structured improvisation off all that stuff from chargen! Fun, flexible magic that doesn't wreck the game! I can't wait to play it!