On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry.

Echoes From Fomalhaut is a fanzine of a different stripe. Published and edited by Gabor Lux, it is a Hungarian fanzine which focuses on ‘Advanced’ fantasy roleplaying games, such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Labyrinth. The inaugural issue, Echoes From Fomalhaut #01: Beware the Beekeeper!, published in March, 2018, presented a solid mix of dungeons, adventures, and various articles designed to present ‘good vanilla’, that is, standard fantasy, but with a heart. Published in August, 2018, the second issue, Echoes From Fomalhaut #02: Gont, Nest of Spies continued this trend with content mostly drawn from the publisher’s own campaign, but as decent as its content was, really needed more of a hook to pull reader and potential Dungeon Master into the issue and the players and their characters into the content. Echoes From Fomalhaut #03: Blood, Death, and Tourism was published in September, 2018 and in reducing the number of articles it gave the fanzine more of a focus and allowed more of the feel of the publisher’s ‘City of Vultures’ campaign to shine through.
Echoes From Fomalhaut #04: Revenge of the Frogs continues this focus and again keeps the article count down to just four. Published in January, 2019, the issue opens with ‘The Technological Table’, a list of futuristic weapons and gadgets, ranging from laser pistol and laser spear to the God-box and The Dark Eye. Many of these items will be familiar from Science Fiction and other gaming articles, so it is refreshing to see some interesting entries alongside the usual electro-whip and laser sword. For example, Aquastel is a liquid so weighty, that when mixed with other liquids, it separates their constituent parts into layers according to their density, so could be used to neutralise poisons or extract valuable metals. The God-box is a communications link to an information bank located deep underground which can be consulted for information, though it is likely to be out of date or phrased on language that the Player Characters do not understand. This sort of article supports a setting where the campaign planet has links to a star faring civilisation or the various weapons and gadgets are remnants of a prior civilisation, fallen long ago. There are echoes of the lost civilisation set-up in the scenario, ‘Terror on Tridentfish Island’, published in Echoes From Fomalhaut #03: Blood, Death, and Tourism.
The scenario in Echoes From Fomalhaut #04: Revenge of the Frogs is the eponymous ‘Revenge of the Frogs’. The has always been an element of batrachian horror in Dungeons & Dragons, going back to Dave Arneson’s scenario, ‘Temple of the Frog’ and creatures such as the Bullywug, as well as drawing on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. Frogs can be alien and emotionless creatures, so make a weird, but worthy enemy in any Dungeons & Dragons scenario. Designed for Player Characters of Third to Fifth Levels, ‘Revenge of the Frogs’ maroons them in the mouldering port of Silvash. The winds have ceased and the local high-priest of Murtar, God of Murky Waters hires the Player Characters to locate the means to restore them in the nearby marshland and prevent the rising of a frog-cult and its dread god that in ages past was destroyed by the priesthood of Murtar. The scenario is designed as a sandbox which will see the Player Characters delving deeper and deeper into the marshland, encountering various dank dangers and independently-minded inhabitants, all of whom are nicely fleshed out and bring colour to the region. Originally written as a companion piece to ‘Cloister of the Frog God’, part of Frog God Games’ Rappan Athuk megadungeon, Revenge of the Frogs’ is a bit rough around the edges and underwritten in terms of set-up and its explanation, especially in the placement of one of its magical items needed to complete the scenario. Otherwise, the scenario has a Lovecraftian tinge combined with a pleasing sense of mouldering decay.
Echoes From Fomalhaut #04: Revenge of the Frogs comes with a map which depicts the outline of a city. This of ‘Arfel – City State of the Charnel God’, which is fully detailed in the issue of the fanzine. This is a city dominated by Ozolba the Zombie God from his labyrinth temple-complex and necropolis which overlooks the city. He and his priesthood—both undead and living—can claim what they want and who they want, and to object is a sin. The nobility of Arfel abide by the stifling Necrotic Traditions, rarely if ever leaving their mansions which are perpetually shrouded in mourning, giving parts of Arfel a sepulchral feel. In the absence of civil government, crime syndicates and gangs have stepped in to run the city, though only unofficially. Only the Outer City beyond its walls is free from Ozolba the Zombie God’s reach, though it a lawless, rough place, where protection much be bought. Meanwhile, throughout the city can be found cat after cat after cat, which hunt in packs against the cat-catchers of the Outer City and know its secret ways from one end to the other. Again, there is the sense of the Lovecraftian to Arfel, it having a Dreamlands-like feel, though heavily influenced by Clark Ashton Smith’s Mordiggian, the Charnel God.
As with Echoes From Fomalhaut #03: Blood, Death, and Tourism, the remaining half of Echoes From Fomalhaut #04: Revenge of the Frogs is dedicated to one article. In the previous issue, this was ‘Erillion, East’, in this issue it is ‘Erillion, West’. This is the second half of a gazetteer detailing the island of Erillion, previously described in Echoes From Fomalhaut #02 and for the most part completed here—there are still plenty of locations mentioned here to be fully detailed in future issues. It continues to detail numerous locations and aspects of this end of the island, some forty or more of them. There is a strand of religiosity which runs through the location descriptions, notably the ‘Lunar Path’, a pilgrimage which leads from black lunar stones to black lunar stones and which will grant those successful with access to the world of dreams, but test them mightily in the process, and the ‘Isle of Trials’, an island west of Erillion, but connected by a pirate infested bridge, which is home to numerous persecuted cults and religious movements. Here the thumbnail descriptions never get as far as living up to their promise, since the reader is left wondering more about the cult or the religious movement and what their religious beliefs are. Hopefully, these might be detailed in a future issue. Otherwise, the thumbnail descriptions are decently done, such as the band of Ogre bandits which capture children and fatten them up for the pot, the court of Lord Virguard the Besieger who keeps five chairs empty in memory of his lost adventuring companions and who will reward tales of brave adventuring, and a marble chess high in the mountains, where two legendary wizards, one transformed into a mountain, the other a cloud, play out an endless game with living figures for the Staff of Power. There are also lots of bandits and thieves and berserkers to encounter too. This western half of Erillion is even more lawless than the Eastern half, and like the earlier ‘Erillion, East’, this half consists of many locations that might be passed through or discovered rather than necessarily visited with any purpose and the Dungeon Master will want to create that purpose or use the scenarios published in the earlier issues which are set on the island.
Echoes From Fomalhaut #04: Revenge of the Frogs definitely feels all the better for having just four articles, their content being allowed to breath and not feel crammed in. It is lightly illustrated, but much of the artwork is really quite good, whether it is public domain or commissioned for the issue, it all fits the oppressive ‘Mitteleuropa’ feel of the author’s ‘City of Vultures’ campaign and is well chosen. It needs an edit here and there, but is generally well written. Of the content, ‘The Technological Table’ is the outlier. It is a good article, but it feels out of place with the rest of the content, whilst the enjoyable ‘Revenge of the Frogs’, creepy ‘Arfel – City State of the Charnel God’, and completing overview that is ‘Erillion, West’, all feel as if they are in the same world. And that perhaps is a problem too, because so far Echoes From Fomalhaut is only giving us snapshots of the ‘City of Vultures’ campaign, not quite a partwork, but getting there. Overall, Echoes From Fomalhaut #04: Revenge of the Frogs is sol'd issue of the fanzine, but it is beginning to feel as if something is wanted to begin pulling the ‘City of Vultures’ campaign together.

Since April is Monster Month here I thought it might be fun to check some monster-themed Sword & Sorcery & Cinema movies.  Up first is a classic and premiered at the height of the 80s fantasy craze. Here is 1981's Dragonslayer from both Paramount and Disney.

We are introduced to one of the most famous dragons outside of Westeros or Erebor, Vermithrax Pejorative.  Though he is mentioned among the dragons in Game of Throne's first season.  

The movie is a little slow, but on par with what was normal at the time.  Peter MacNicol is fine as the apprentice turned dragonslayer Galen, but I can't help but think if someone else would have been better in the role.  Caitlin Clarke was great as the girl pretending to be a boy Valerian.  She returned to theatre work after this and this was her only major role.  She sadly passed of ovarian cancer in 2004.

Sadly the movie under-performed in the box office and some of the reviews were not great, but the movie was fun then and to be honest the effects have held up well enough.  It has achieved "cult movie" status and that is not a bad thing.  It certainly is a great one to have on a Dragon-themed movie night.

The effects are good and the director gets away with a lot of "showing less is more."  We only see bits and pieces of the dragon until the very end when it is most effective. Sure some of the stop motion looks very stop motion-y, but Vermithrax still looks like he could go toe to toe with Smaug or Drogon.  I really can't help but think that this dragon wasn't at least some of the inspiration for the DragonRaid game. 

The musical queues in this are pure Disney so they are also very effective. 

Gaming Content

Now THAT is a Dragonlance! The Sicarius Dracorum really shows that a spear, or a lance, is the best weapon for fighting a dragon.  The forging scene where Galen heats the metal with magic is really one of the best.  If you are not forging your magic weapons like this then you are missing out!

Caitlin's dragon scale shield, while less theatric, is just as magical. 

I am sure there are those that will nitpick that the "dragon" only has two legs and not four, but I can't get worked up over that. He is still a fantastic dragon.

Another creature in the guise of an animal and we do not go too far astray from the homes of the barghest. This time the animal is a cat and creature is a Cat-sìth.   

Cat-sìth
aka Cait Sídhe
Medium Fey

Frequency: Rare
Number Appearing: 1 (1d8)
Alignment: Neutral [Chaotic Neutral]
Movement: 180' (60') [18"]
Armor Class: 3 [16]
Hit Dice: 4d8+4* (22 hp)
THAC0: 15 (+4)
Attacks: 2 claws, 1 bite, + special
Damage: 1d4+1 x2, 1d6+1
Special: Bad luck, fear, low-light vision (120’), scent, speech
Save: Monster 4
Morale: 6 (6)
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 200 (OSE) 215 (LL)

Cait Sídhe or Cat Sìth (Caught SHEE) are magical cat-like creatures that populate the same lands of faeries and other woodland creatures. They appear to be large cats with black fur and a spot of white on their chest. Sometimes they have white paws or even white faces.  All cat-sìth have eyes that glow yellow, orange, or green. In the lands they call home the cat-sìth are often feared to be demons or a witch in the form of a cat. In any case, the appearance of a cat sìth is a sure sign that a witch is nearby.

Cat-sìth makes sudden sprints to bring down prey. It prefers to attack small mammals and birds and rarely physically attack humanoids, though it has been recorded of a Cat-sìth adding a pixie or brownie to their diet once in a while. When dealing with humanoids a cat-sìth can defend themselves physically but prefer to use their spell-like abilities.

Bad Luck: The cat-sìth can target one victim as a recipient of a Bad Luck curse.  This cast as a Bestow Curse spell by a 4th level witch.  The victim is at a -2 on all rolls till sunrise the next day. The cat-sìth may do this up to 3/day but multiple uses on the same target are not cumulative.

Fear: The sight of a cat-sìth is so disturbing to most that it emanates a Fear Aura that acts like a fear spell cast by a 5th level caster. The difference is that the aura is limited to 5’ and the victim must be able to see the cat sìth.

The cat-sìth has low-light vision to 120’. A cat-sìth is capable of speech and can speak any language its intelligence allows. They can speak Common, Sylvan, any local language, and the language of Cats.  

The cat-sìth makes an excellent familiar. Their association with witches is long and not without cause.  Most cat-sìth avoid humanoids, with the exceptions of the fey, so the only ones likely to be encountered by humanoids are the ones in the charge of a witch. They are all believed to be in the service of the King of Cats (Cat Lord).

--

A fun little beastie.  This one adds an "AKA" line under the name, many monsters are known by other names as well. 

While this one looks like a cat it is actually a faerie creature.  Now I could have listed it as Beast (Fey) like the Barghest is Beast (Demonic), but I felt that it fit better as a proper creature of the fey.   

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another DM and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will be compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry.

Delayed Blast Gamemaster is a fanzine of a different stripe. Published by Philip Reed Games following successful Kickstarter campaigns, Delayed Blast Gamemaster is a fanzine dedicated to supporting roleplaying fantasy games, but a particular style of fantasy roleplaying games—Dungeons & Dragons. Yet the issues are entirely systemless, which means that their contents can be used in Dungeons & Dragons, any of the fantasy roleplaying retroclones you care to name, and most fantasy roleplaying games with a little effort. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of the inaugural Zine Quest, the first issue of Delayed Blast Gamemaster was published in September, 2019, followed by the second issue a year later in September, 2020, again following a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2 is as physically striking as Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1. Its graphical design is all white art and text on matt black pages (a printer friendly version is also available), the effect being striking, almost jauntily creepy and oppressive in its artwork’s depiction of mad mages, wiggle cubes, undying angers, gnashing rock beasts, and more. Again, the text is both heavy and large, so is a lot easier to read than it otherwise might have been.

As to the concept behind Delayed Blast Gamemaster it is simply that of inspiration scattered subject by subject across nine tables. So ‘OneDTen Urban Locations’, ‘OneDSix Forgotten Spellbooks’, ‘FiveDSix Unusual Treasures’, ‘OneDEight Dungeon Oddities’, ‘OneDSix Magic Shields’, ‘TwoDSix Potions’, ‘OneDSix Warped Monsters’, ‘OneDTwelve Adventure Hooks’, and ‘OneDFour Dungeon Doors’. So all that the Game Master has to do is pick a table or subject, roll the die, check the relevant entry, and use it as inspiration to create something of her or adapt the entry to the roleplaying game of her choice. The most obvious choice to adapt the entry to, is of course, Dungeons & Dragons, due to the similarities in language, but other roleplaying games would work too.
The concept behind Delayed Blast Gamemaster and thus Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2 is tables of inspiration accompanied by more tables. There are eleven such tables in the issue, ranging from ‘OneDSix Dungeon Characters’ and ‘FiveDSix Unusual Treasures’ to ‘OneDEight Dungeon Conditions’ and ‘OneDSix Pockets Picked’. Thus, all that the Game Master has to do is pick a table or subject, roll the die, check the relevant entry, and use it as inspiration to create something of her or adapt the entry to the roleplaying game of her choice. The most obvious choice to adapt the entry to, is of course, Dungeons & Dragons, due to the similarities in terminology, but other roleplaying games would work too.
For example, roll a five on ‘OneDEight Adventure Hooks’ and the Game Master has her adventurers encounter a ‘Grizzled Warrior Questioning His Career’. The veteran, the worse for wear from drink readily shares tales of his exploits, the type of exploits that the Player Characters are likely going to want to emulate, though somewhat ruefully since he seems to regret his career choice. However, his ramblings might contain a nugget of truth or two, necessitating a further roll of a four-sided die. For example, a roll of a three determines that he regales the party of the time that he and his companions were attacked by a giant whose mighty Warhammer crushed many of them, and the last time he saw the giant, it was wandering away with the possessions of those he had slaughtered. Could the giant still have their possessions, and just were they?
Alternatively, roll a fourteen on ‘FiveDSix Unwanted Treasures’—a sequel to ‘FiveDSix Unusual Treasures’ from Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1—and the adventurers find a small book bound in metal with pages of thick parchment, half full with the incomplete memoirs of a halfling merchant which tell of his life as a great lover and warrior. Similarly, ‘OneDEight Dungeon Oddities’ is another sequel to a table from Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1. It provides more monstrous encounters, such as the ‘Wizard’s Goblinoid’, a result of a roll of one on the table, which describes a goblin who really, weirdly enjoys being a Wizard’s familiar and knows a few cantrips, whilst a roll of five would give a ‘Wiggle Cube’, a very rare orange gelatinous cuboid with sufficient awareness to track down and take control of other oozes and slimes. Perhaps one of the most engaging table is ‘OneDSix Guards’, which describes the personalities of six town guards so making them more than just the local watch ready to step in when the party causes trouble!
With eleven tables, there are a lot of entries and ideas in Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2, which is the point. In comparison to the first issue, there is a better range of entries in Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2, including oddities, memorable weapons, adventure hooks, magic scrolls, dungeon conditions, and the contents of pockets picked. There are, however, a few tables and entries which are designed for single use only given their suggested rarity. The ‘Wiggle Cube’ from ‘OneDEight Dungeon Oddities’ is one such entry, whilst the ‘OneDSix Goblins’ table gives six strange, even singular goblins that it is advised that the Dungeon Master consult the table rarely lest their overuse lessen their impact. This slightly reduces the utility of Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2.
Rounding out Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2 is ‘Cave of Eyes’, a six-location set of caverns which comes with a background and some broad detail such that it needs to be fleshed out and detailed by the Dungeon Master. It is not a particularly interesting location as written and really needs that input, and perhaps it might have been more interesting if it had included suggestions as to which tables the Dungeon Master could roll on to further develop the cave complex. Otherwise, a table might have been more useful.
Once again, Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2 presents a plethora of things a Game Master can bring to her game. She will need to do some work to bring them into her campaign, but the ideas will work with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition as much as they would with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl Classics, or The Fantasy Trip. Whatever your choice of fantasy roleplaying game, further inspiration is never unwanted and Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2 yet more.

Here is an old favorite of mine that I have done a couple of different versions of in various postings and books.  Is this the final version? No idea! But it is getting close.

This one is a nasty little beastie from English lore.

Barghest
Large Beast (Demonic)

Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing: 1d6 (1 or 1d4)
Alignment: Chaotic [Chaotic Evil]
Movement: 180' (60') [18"]
  Humanoid: 120' (40') [12"]
  Hybrid: 150' (50') [15"]
Armor Class: 3 [16]
Hit Dice: 6d8+12** (39 hp)
   Large 6d10+12** (45 hp)
THAC0: 13 (+6)
Attacks: 2 claws (humanoid/hybrid) or 1 bite (dog/hybrid)
Damage: 1d6 x2 claw or 2d4 bite
Special: Stare, hit by silver or magical weapons.
Save: Monster 6
Morale: 10 (10)
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 950 (OSE) 980 (LL)

A Barghest is an evil shape-changing fiend that hungers for the souls of mortals. A barghest may appear as a huge demonic black dog the size of a bear, or in a humanoid form nearly seven feet tall, resembling a goblin or wingless gargoyle, or a combination of both forms. A barghest never uses weapons, even in its humanoid form, preferring to feel the blood of its enemies run down its claws. It is tenacious; if a barghest fails its morale check and flees, it will return in 1d6 turns to attack again.

Anyone who meets the gaze of a barghest will feel the heat of the monster's stare; such characters must save vs. Paralysis or be paralyzed in terror for 1d6+1 turns (or until the barghest is slain). A character is deemed to have met the gaze of the barghest if he or she faces it in combat, or if the character is surprised by the monster. Fighting a barghest with gaze averted results in a penalty of -4 on all attack rolls. Those who succeed at the saving throw are immune to the monster's gaze for the remainder of the combat (at least one full turn at the minimum).

Although it is not undead, a barghest is inherently unholy and can be Turned by Clerics (as a spectre). They can only be harmed by silver or magical weapons. A barghest generally speaks Common as well as the languages of infernals, goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, and can communicate with wolves. One can sometimes be found ruling over goblins or hobgoblins, but most commonly a barghest haunts a lonely stretch of road, preying on travelers.

Barghest lairs will only have a single creature or a creature and up to three whelps.  A barghest whelm is weaned at one year and kicked out of the lair.  If encountered by a parent or siblings it will be attacked. Barghests have no sense of family and hate all creatures except for themselves.

Their coats are of the darkest of blacks and often matted with blood. Their eyes burn red and it is said the fires of hell can be seen in them. 

--

What's new today?

This creature has a few more things going on.

First, it is a Large Beast (Demonic). Let's break that down.   
In my Basic Bestiary, I am going to give different HD for different sized creatures.  A Large creature will use a d10.  Medium creatures will still use a standard d8, Small a d6, and Tiny a d4.  On the other side of things, a Huge creature will use a d12 and a Gargantuan creature will use a d20.  This is much the same as D&D 5e uses. 

For the purists, you can continue to use the d8 but I will include both numbers as I am doing above.  AD&D First Edition only used Small, Medium, and Large creatures.  The vast majority will be these three sizes. 

It is a beast, but also Demonic.  So it's intelligence is higher and has some demonic traits.  In this case, it can change shape, can only be hit by magic or silver, and has a special gaze attack.

I am also including a THAC0 line with a BAB in parentheses. 

Things are shaping up.

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another DM and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Another choice is the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game.

Published by Straycouches Press, Crawl! is one such fanzine dedicated to the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Since Crawl! No. 1 was published in March, 2012 has not only provided ongoing support for the roleplaying game, but also been kept in print by Goodman Games. Now because of online printing sources like Lulu.com, it is no longer as difficult to keep fanzines from going out of print, so it is not that much of a surprise that issues of Crawl! remain in print. It is though, pleasing to see a publisher like Goodman Games support fan efforts like this fanzine by keeping them in print and selling them directly.

Where Crawl! No. 1 was something of a mixed bag, Crawl! #2 was a surprisingly focused, exploring the role of loot in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and describing various pieces of treasure and items of equipment that the Player Characters might find and use. Similarly, Crawl! #3 was just as focused, but the subject of its focus was magic rather than treasure. Unfortunately, the fact that a later printing of Crawl! No. 1 reprinted content from Crawl! #3 somewhat undermined the content and usefulness of Crawl! #3. Fortunately, Crawl! Issue Number Four was devoted to Yves Larochelle’s ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’, a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game for characters of Fifth Level. Crawl! Issue V continued the run of themed issues, focusing on monsters, but ultimately to not always impressive effect, whilst Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection presented some interesting versions of classic Dungeons & Dragons-style Classes for Dungeon Crawl Classics, though not enough of them.

As the title suggests, Crawl! Issue No. 7: Tips! Tricks! Traps! is a bit of bit of a medley issue, addressing a number of different aspects of dungeoneering and fantasy roleplaying. The issue opens with ‘Lost in Endless Corridors’ by Kirin Robinson. It contrasts the attraction and joy of the maze with the challenge of not making the play of mazes in fantasy roleplaying games, well, boring. What it highlights is the potential frustration of playing through a maze and the loss of player agency. It suggests two solutions to avoid this. The first is to set time limits on resources and character statuses during their exploration of the maze, such as their torches running out or their beginning to feel light-headed after a time. The second is move the exploration of the maze from being procedurally-based to clue-based, and so make the maze more interesting rather than an endless series of empty of corridors. This would need more work for the Judge than simply drawing out a map, but the potential pay-off would be greater and make the maze more memorable than frustrating.

Thom Hall’s ‘Roguelike Fountains’ is inspired by Roguelike computer adventure games, in particular, the fountains with their messages and effects to be found in such games. It comes with a number of tables for determining the nature of any fountain found and what its accompanying message might be. Thus magical or non-magical, and various effects and messages, with even the non-magical fountains often having some kind of effect. The use of the ‘Square’ font for tables, as used in the computer game adds to the nostalgic feel of the piece.

Sean Ellis continues his irregular Monster Column with ‘Consider the Ogre’. It points out the discrepancy between the Troll and the Ogre in Dungeons & Dragons, that the Dungeons & Dragons Troll with its rubbery skin and regenerative health is not the traditional Troll of myth and legend. That role actually falls to the Ogre. Although it does not suggest replacing one with the other, it does offer ways of making the Ogre more interesting than simply as a coarse, chaotic baby-snatching species of humanoids. It suggest the possibility that some might even be repentant and there might be multiple types of Ogre. This possibility is supported by tables for rolling an Ogre’s appearance and how different it is, and a power and a weakness, and then connecting the three together to create a cohesive design. Overall, it is a quick and dirty way of creating more individualistic Ogres.

‘Critical Table T: Traps – Traps and Crits’ by Jeffrey Tadlock details six traps ready to be placed in a Judge’s dungeon. These are simple enough—the spiked pit trap, the poison needle lock, the scythe hall, falling block, and repeating poison arrow trap—and arguably, classics of the fantasy gaming genre. Rather than have the Player Character affected by a trap make a saving throw against the effects of the trap when triggered, the Judge makes an attack roll against the Player Character for the trap. This means that traps, just as other forms of attack in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, need to have a table for determining what happens when a critical result is rolled on the attack. This is rolled on Critical Table T: Traps, a table of thirty results, the die rolled for any one trap determined by the attack modifier for the trap. So on a roll of one on any die, the trap springs perfectly and inflicts extra damage, but an attack modifier of +10 or +11 and the Judge is rolling a fourteen-sided die on Critical Table T: Traps, which might give the result of eleven, the damage inflicted strikes the target’s spinal area or if poison, overwhelms her central nervous system. Either way, the player needs to make a Fortitude Saving Throw for his character to remain conscious and the character also suffers two five-sided dice’s worth of extra damage. This makes traps even deadlier and makes the Thief Class far more important in disarming traps.

The ‘Shadowsword of Ith-Narmant’ is a write-up of a demonic shadow sword by Jürgen Mayer. It was forged from the demon’s own shadow by bound shadow warlocks and artificers, and like many of their creations may be found scattered across many worlds. It is treated as a longsword, but two six-sided dice are rolled for damage and when doubles are rolled, there is an extra effect, such as on double threes, ‘Taintburst’ inflicts three extra damage on the wielder and target, this damage, if it kills wielder or target, the demonic energies in the sword fuses with them, making them rise as a demon minion of Ith-Narmant. There are six such effects, one each for the six sets of doubles, but the very first, rolls of double ones, ‘Lifesucker’, sucks permanent Hit Points from the wielder and when enough is sucked out, the ‘Shadowsword of Ith-Narmant’ gains a Level. Each Level increases the viciousness and intelligence of the blade and inflict demonsigns on the wielder, which will have deleterious effects on the wielder’s alignment, ultimately turning him into a Champion of Ith-Narmant. The sword, ‘Shadowsword of Ith-Narmant’ is by any other name, Stormbringer from the novel by Michael Moorcock—or at least is inspired by it. Even if it is a bit too obvious, the mechanics are well done and bringing the sword into a campaign should give it an epic feel.

Rounding out the issue is ‘My Gongfarmer Can’t Do Sh*t!’ by Paul Wolfe. It is a call for the Zero Level characters of Character Funnel in Dungeon Crawl Classics to have skills and to be able to do things that reflect their backgrounds and occupations rolled during character creation. Not through an extensive list of skills, but rather through player creativity and narration when his Zero Level Player Character needs to do something which does not involve fighting, running, or screaming (or dying). It will require a little extra adjudication upon the part of the Judge, but the method will add to the background of any Zero Level character who survives a Character Funnel.

Physically, Crawl! Issue No. 7: Tips! Tricks! Traps! is decently put together. The few pieces of art vary in quality, some of it being a little cartoonish. The contents though, vary in quality and usefulness. This is not to say that none of the contents of the issue are useless, but none really quite stand out as being so useful that the Judge has to have access to them. The advice in ‘Lost in Endless Corridors’ and ‘My Gongfarmer Can’t Do Sh*t!’ feels a little obvious, unless of course, the Judge is new to Dungeon Crawl Classics, and whilst ‘Critical Table T: Traps – Traps and Crits’ and ‘Shadowsword of Ith-Narmant’ both add to the game, neither feels vital to a Judge’s game. Crawl! Issue No. 7: Tips! Tricks! Traps! feels like a mixed bag, containing good content, but just not good enough to be a must have.

“El sueño de la razon produce monstruos”The sleep of reason produces monsters.Francisco Goya, 1799

It is April and that means it is time for the AtoZ Challenge for 2021. I didn't do this for a few years, but this year I wanted to give it a go again to see how it has changed, see what is new, and mostly to motivate me to get all my monsters done!

My monster book idea grew from my love of monster books in general.  I have spoken about my love for the original Monster Manual here a few times. I have talked about other monster books too.  For me it was monsters that were my gateway to D&D. I still love them.

This year is the A to Z of Monsters. I am working on completing a couple of different monster books. One focused on monsters of fairy tales, myths, and legends and in particular monsters related to witchcraft. The other is a massive tome of demons and fiends of all sorts.  The first book will feature all sorts of creatures, right now there are a large number of undead monsters.  Makes sense when you consider that I spend a lot of time writing and playing horror games.   

Some creatures have appeared in my witch books.  Some are completely new.  Many have come from challenges like this and my Monstrous Mondays posts.  Some are even like today's beastie.  A d20 conversion of a 3.5 monster to OSR-like stats.

As I have been discussing here I am working on my "universal stat-block."  Today though I am going to start with the one I have been using in my Monstrous Mondays and tweak it from here.

Allip
Medium Undead (Incorporeal)

Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing: 0 (1d4)
Alignment: Chaotic [Chaotic Evil]
Movement: 60' (20') [6"]
  Fly: 60' (20') [6"]
Armor Class: 5 [14]
Hit Dice: 4d8+2** (20 hp)
Attacks: Special
Damage: NA See below
Special: Suprise, touch deals 1 point of Wisdom drain, only hit by silver or magical weapons.
Save: Monster 4
Morale: 12 (12)
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 275 (OSE) 290 (LL)

Allips are shadowy, incorporeal undead that mutter and speak with the voice of madness from beyond the grave. The voice acts as a Suggestion spell upon anyone hearing the quiet mutterings: the suggestions of an allip are usually senseless but sinister.

An allip is usually only seen out of the corners of the eye.  Thus they can surprise on a roll of 1-4 on a d6. Elves are surprised only on a roll of 1-3.  Once it attacks it is visible to all. 

The allip’s touch does not deal damage but causes the victim to lose 1 point of wisdom. If a victim’s wisdom falls to 0, it dies and will become a shadow within 2d6 days. Allips can only be hit with magical or silver weapons.

It is believed that allips are caused by people who have died in a state of profound despair.  Now they seek revenge on the living for their current state. They are always found where they died.  They are turned as a 4 HD undead.

--

So here is a start! 

You can find all the other participating blogs and their social media links on this Google Sheet.

I also have a growing Twitter List here of everyone participating on Twitter.

**Please Note. I have 'Comment Moderation' turn on. I have been getting hit with a ton of spam.**

When we sit down to roleplay, the one thing we invariably have in front of us is a set of dice. We have been using dice in roleplaying for as long as we have been roleplaying and just about everyone who games has their own set. They are of course tools, tools that we use to determine the outcomes of our character’s actions. Yet we come to invest our hopes and fears in our dice as we play and we place our characters in increasingly perilous situations, but this degree of investment and how it manifests varies from player to player. One player might hold on to one set of dice which he uses for every game he plays, another might build a set of dice he only uses for one character, one player might dump one set of dice and replace it with another due to poor results or character death, and another may simply collect dice. There is an amazing array of dice available in a variety of styles and materials—metals, gemstones, wood, and even moose poop. Then there are dice sets for different games. In some cases, particular dice are required to play particular games. For example, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire from Fantasy Flight Games requires its own set of dice, as does Fvlminata: Armed with Lightning with its ‘Talia’ or knucklebone dice and Free League Publishing’s ‘Year Zero Engine’ family of games such as Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days or the more recent Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying.

In most other cases, publishers manufacture dice for their roleplaying games which are absolutely not required to play their games. If such dice are not required, then what do they add? They certainly do not add to the game itself in terms of play, any more than any other set of dice a player might have in his collection. What they enforce is brand identity, so that if a player has a set of Call of Cthulhu dice when playing Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition or a set of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha dice for playing RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, they add to the idea that the players are playing those games, encouraging a degree of immersion, but without adding anything directly to that play.

Released by The Evergreen Burrow following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the Lucky Ducks In A Row-Rubber Duckie Dice Set is a complete set of polyhedral dice. The standard set that we have been gaming with for over forty years. So a four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, twelve-sided, and twenty-sided die, plus two ten-sided dice for percentile rolls, thus everything that a roleplayer will need to play a wide variety of roleplaying games, from Dungeons & Dragons to RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. What sets these dice apart from any set of dice is the fact that each die is of clear resin and each one contains a single, yellow, rubber duck. In order to accommodate these ducks, the dice in the Lucky Ducks In A Row-Rubber Duckie Dice Set is larger than the ordinary set of dice. Each one is 26 mm across, which means that they feel bigger in the hand and they are easier to read with consequently larger numbers. Only the four-sided die is different. It is not big enough to be home to a rubber duck, so instead its numbers are replaced with symbols. The one with a duck and the other numbers with the webbed feet that your friendly, cute rubber duck does not actually have.

So why ‘duck dice’? There is no roleplaying game which focuses entirely on ducks, and of course, the Lucky Ducks In A Row-Rubber Duckie Dice Set can be used with innumerable roleplaying games, so there is no obvious brand identity that these dice could be enforcing. Except… there is always Glorantha, and famously (infamously?) Glorantha has Ducks. Anthropomorphic Ducks. Complete with their own culture and beliefs which you can play and encounter as NPCs. So if you are playing a Duck in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha or 13th Age Glorantha and you bring these dice to the table, you are not only enforcing the fact that these dice are yours, you are enforcing the fact that you are playing a Duck. Duck Dice for your Duck character.

Then there is the fact that ducks are cute. Especially rubber ducks. They are yellow, bright, and cheery. Therefore, a rubber duck dice set is, by extension, also cute. Plus, you get to roll them. How often do you get to see tumbling rubber ducks? At your table? Then, they come with a bathtub display. A clear, plastic freestanding bathtub in classic Victorian style. Which means you have somewhere to store them—on the table during the game and on the shelf after the game.

Ultimately though, like so many sets of dice, the Lucky Ducks In A Row-Rubber Duckie Dice Set is completely and utterly unnecessary. If a roleplayer already has a set of polyhedral dice, arguably, she does not need another. Roleplayers are roleplayers though, and a great many of them like having more dice, different dice, and themed dice, like the Lucky Ducks In A Row-Rubber Duckie Dice Set. And yet, these dice are fun, they are silly, and they are cute, and if you have a set, there can be no doubt that the Lucky Ducks In A Row-Rubber Duckie Dice Set is your set, that they are your dice.

When we sit down to roleplay, the one thing we invariably have in front of us is a set of dice. We have been using dice in roleplaying for as long as we have been roleplaying and just about everyone who games has their own set. They are of course tools, tools that we use to determine the outcomes of our character’s actions. Yet we come to invest our hopes and fears in our dice as we play and we place our characters in increasingly perilous situations, but this degree of investment and how it manifests varies from player to player. One player might hold on to one set of dice which he uses for every game he plays, another might build a set of dice he only uses for one character, one player might dump one set of dice and replace it with another due to poor results or character death, and another may simply collect dice. There is an amazing array of dice available in a variety of styles and materials—metals, gemstones, wood, and even moose poop. Then there are dice sets for different games. In some cases, particular dice are required to play particular games. For example, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire from Fantasy Flight Games requires its own set of dice, as does Fvlminata: Armed with Lightning with its ‘Talia’ or knucklebone dice and Free League Publishing’s ‘Year Zero Engine’ family of games such as Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days or the more recent Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying.

In most other cases, publishers manufacture dice for their roleplaying games which are absolutely not required to play their games. If such dice are not required, then what do they add? They certainly do not add to the game itself in terms of play, any more than any other set of dice a player might have in his collection. What they enforce is brand identity, so that if a player has a set of Call of Cthulhu dice when playing Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition or a set of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha dice for playing RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, they add to the idea that the players are playing those games, encouraging a degree of immersion, but without adding anything directly to that play.

So, the question is, does the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set do the same for Traveller? Manufactured by Mongoose Publishing, this is a set of twenty six-sided dice, white with blue dots for the numbers on the first through fifth faces. The sixth face though is marked with the symbol of the Travellers’ Aid Society—the letters ‘TAS’ in a hexagon, a spaceship marking the counter or space at the top of the letter ‘A’. In Traveller, the Travellers’ Aid Society is a private organisation which maintains hostels and facilities at nearly all class A and B starports across Charted Space, providing its members with somewhere to stay, a regular means of travel, and information about worlds throughout known space. Membership can be purchased, but most Player Characters will receive membership as part of their mustering out benefits for meritorious or heroic conduct in service. Thus, the Travellers’ Aid Society is part of the fabric of the Traveller setting.

As much as the Travellers’ Aid Society is a part of the fabric of the Traveller setting, it not necessarily a brand identifier or icon associated with the Traveller setting or roleplaying game, whereas perhaps the Imperial Sunburst is, and is used across different institutions of the Third Imperium. Thus, black with a yellow sunburst for the Imperial Royal Family, yellow for the Imperial Navy, red for the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service, and so on. Could the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set have benefited from some variety in terms of colours and icons—perhaps those of the Third Imperium and other polities? Admittedly, that would mean that the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set would not be the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set, but a Traveller dice set. Plus, it would have made manufacturing and packaging that little bit more complex. Then there is the question of twenty six-sided dice—are that many needed? In a game like Traveller, most players will be rolling two six-sided dice at a time for skill checks and similar actions. They are going to be rolling perhaps four dice at the most to determine damage in combat, although this may increase as many to six when employing particularly heavy weapons or in starship combat. Thus, there is enough dice for a single group, perhaps consisting of a Game Master and four players with four dice each, or even more if they have fewer dice in front of them. In effect, the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set is not a dice set for a player or the Game Master, but for the group. Even so, there is still the matter of the price. The Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set has a recommended retail price of £25 ($25).

Each die in the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set has a recommended retail price of £1.25 ($1.25).

Now of course, there are costs involved in the manufacture and shipping of any product. Of course, there are. Getting the moulds cut for the dice, designing the packaging, assembling the packaging, shipping, and so on. But £1.25 ($1.25) per die? For a set of dice that is not that interesting, does not add to the play of the game, and in play does not strongly enforce the brand?

There can be no doubt that the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set is nicely packaged. It comes a in neat little box. Yet it is no more than a frippery, a collector’s item that some Traveller devotees will want to have in their collection, because it does not add a great deal to the play of the roleplaying game and it is debatable whether it adds very much to the brand because the Travellers’ Aid Society icon is not as recognisable as others in Traveller. Could it be that the Travellers’ Aid Society Dice Set is just a bit dull and just a bit too expensive?

I am posting this at the end of the month instead of the first (new month, new character) since April will be full of monsters.  But in a way, today's character is a monster in his own right.

Last month I posted the stats for Twill Topknot and before that Sarana, the first main NPCs of my War of the Witch Queens campaign.   While I have plenty more NPCs to figure out and stat up, there is one that I do need to do and figure out how he did it.  That NPC is Kelek the Cruel.

I have talked about good (evil) old Kelek in the past and I think stating him out is a good idea. He has his origins in Basic/Expert D&D, Quest for the Heartstone and The Shady Dragon Inn, so Basic-era is the obvious choice.  More so since he is my Big Bad for War of the Witch Queens.

One of the things I want to do with this is pick and choose from various RPG/OSR systems.  I did Old School Essentials with Twill.  While that doesn't mean I can't reuse it, but I would like to see what is out there. I also need to figure out what sort of "magic-user" old Kelek is since I also have that choice.

Much like what I have done with Skylla (with whom he has a history with) I took her Magic-user and tried her out as a witch in various OSR style games. If she is a witch, then what is Kelek?  

He is a type of wizard to be sure.  He learned his magic, so a warlock or a sorcerer (as defined by D&D 3 to 5) is fun, but not really who he is. I need some class that also has the ability to cast gates, maybe even a way to summon a minor demon or two. But not someone interested in controlling undead. Most importantly I need someone that would be able to kill a Witch Queen.  

We know from Kelek's history that he wants some form of immortality or mastery over life and death.  To me that says Necromancer.  But I am kinda bored with necromancers.  I mean I have done necromancers so many times.  BUT this group has never gone up against one of my necromancers before.  Eric over at Swords & Stitchery also talks about Kelek and even has him becoming a lich. Eric usually has very good ideas, so I am inclined to take this as a vote towards Necromancer. 

So if it is a necromancer, then which one?

The Basic Fantasy one is nice, but not really powerful enough for what I need.  The necromancer from Adventures Dark & Deep is good. Has a lot of potential but still not exactly what I want. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea also has a great necromancer, but the spell list is not 100% where I want it. Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts are getting much closer, as is Gavin's Theorems and Thaumaturgy. The one that feels the closest is the one from the BX RPG.

I reviewed the BX RPG a while back and have been wanting to do something more with it. 

If he is my big bad for War of the Witch Queens then I am going to take advantage of BX RPGs 1-20 level spread and make him 15th level.

Get your own Kelek the Crue from HeroForge

Kelek the Cruel
Male Human (mostly) Necromancer, 15th level, Chaotic Evil

Strength: 15
Intelligence: 15
Wisdom: 13
Dexterity: 11
Constitution: 14
Charisma: 7

HD: 9d4 +6 (+9)
hp: 40

AC: 0 (Bracers AC 1, Ring of Protection +!)
Base THAC0: 14

Saving Throws (+1 for magic, +1 ring)
Paralyzation: 8
Petrification: 8
Wands: 9
Breath Weapon: 11
Spells: 8

Weapons
Dagger +1
Staff of Striking
Wand of Cold

Spells
First level: Read Magic, Sleep, Necrotic Shield, Fear, Hold Portal, Read Languages
Second level: Hold Person, Knock, Mirror Image, Wizard Lock, Necrotic Touch, Blight
Third level: Fly, Haste, Death Purge, Clairvoyance, Necrotic Blast, Dispel Magic
Fourth level: Dimension Door, Polymorph Other, Necrotic Strike, Wizard Eye, Confusion
Fifth level: Plane of Death, Magic Jar, Teleport, Life Drain
Sixth level: Abyssal Flame, Anti-Magic Shell, Death Spell
Seventh level: Astral Spell, Instant Summons
Eighth level: Clone, Gate

Scrolls*
First level: Chill Touch
Second level: Choke, Speak with the Dead
Third level: Skull Sight, Unhallow
Fourth level: Charm Monster
Fifth level: Death Spell
Sixth level: Knowledge of Life
Seventh level: Summon Demon
Eighth level: Symbol (Pain)

Height: 5'11"
Weight: 156 lbs
Age: 55

*The spells from scrolls are Necromancer spells from Theorems and Thaumaturgy. I am likely to give him other necromancer scrolls from the other necromancers out there. 

I also say mostly human since I consider Kelek to have a bit of orc in his line somewhere.  This explains his high strength and constitution, his low charisma, his pointed ears, oddly shaped head in some depictions of him.  He can also speak orc and hangs out with Zarak all the time. 

Kelek also has a large warg he rides like a horse.  In typical D&D cartoon fashion, his name is just Warg.

Kelek on Warg from HeroForge

Yeah, I have a lot of plans for this guy. 

Now I need to figure out how he killed the Queen of Witches to get us all in the current problems we are in.

So no monster today.  I am getting ready for my big April A to Z of Monsters later this week. 

I was on vacation last week and getting these "new" AD&D 2nd Edition setting books made me think a bit about what I might do with them.  But since monsters are also on my mind I decided it was high time to pull out my old Monstrous Compendiums for AD&D 2nd Ed, and finally get them organized.

I don't recall exactly when, but I misplaced, lost, or sold my original Monstrous Compendiums.  I kinda regret it really, I got them on the days they were released.  I loved the idea of them.  A monster per page full of information.  Even some bits on the ecology of each.  I had ideas of cutting out the various "Ecology of" articles from Dragon and putting them in each one for a full encyclopedic entry of every monster.

While the idea sounds great, in practice the Monstrous Compendiums were a bit of a hassle.  They were large and unwieldy and yes the pages kept getting torn.  The big thing for me was the fact I could note "really" put the monsters in true alphabetical order since they were printed back to back.  I know, gamer problems.

So I pulled everything I had, everything I have managed to round up at actions, used book stores and even a few others, and got both folders finally put together.

In addition to the first two sets (all in the first binder) I got the sets for the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, the Outer Planes, and my beloved Ravenloft all in the second binder.

I just need to replace my Greyhawk and Mystara ones now. 

I know I have some more in boxes somewhere, so I'll get those added as well.  Since I am not longer a transient college student with all my D&D books in a couple of milk crates they can live nicely on my bookshelves. Here they would likely to get more use and less wear and tear.

They live nicely next to my Castles & Crusades Monsters & Treasure Compendium,  Next to them is something I am working on printing out; the contents of the Swords & Wizardry versions of Monstrosities and Tome of Horrors Complete.  It is going to be about 1200 or more pages of monsters.  This time I am not printing them back to back, but a true one page per monster.  Yeah, that means a lot more paper, but also a lot more ease of use and lots of room for me to include notes. IT will also be hard on my printer.

While there is a core of about 400-500 monsters that are shared across all editions of D&D and clones, there are something like 6,000+ monsters that have been stated up in official products.  Once upon a time, I would have wanted all of them.  Today I am a bit more reasonable.  

OR at least that is what I tell myself.

The Highway of Blood: A Call of Cthulhu Scenario for the 1970s is a one-shot scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, published on the Miskatonic Repository. It stands out as being different for four reasons. First, it is set during the nineteen seventies. Second, it is inspired by the low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films of the period, shown in a ‘grindhouse’ or ‘action house’ cinema, such as Duel, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and the more recent Death Proof. Third, in doing so, the scenario involves a number of elements which the players may find disturbing. In fact, more disturbing than is the norm for a Call of Cthulhu scenario. These include drug use, sadistic violence, implied rape (against NPCs), torture, cannibalism, body horror, and violence against children. Consequently, the scenario comes with a warning and advice on how to handle such topics, including making clear to the players the nature of the content of the scenario and discussing any boundaries they may have—essentially a ‘Session Zero’, if necessary fading to black and drawing a veil in what might otherwise be a personally harrowing scene, and ultimately respecting a player’s limits. Even if that means ending the current session. So to be clear, The Highway of Blood is not a scenario for the timid or the easily offended, its content is of a grittily adult nature and so requires mature players, but it goes out of its way to be upfront about this and gives advice on how to handle it.

The Highway of Blood takes place in 1975, along The Devil’s Backbone, a scenic drive along a limestone ridge in the Texas Hill Country. It is purportedly one of the most haunted spots in the Lone Star State. The Player Characters, who might be friends on a week-long road trip through West Texas, or FBI agents from the Dallas office who are investigating a series of disappearances in the area, begin play on the road, getting low on fuel and in one of the worst heat waves the region has ever seen, also in need of a cold drink. When they see a sign up ahead promising ‘Gas & Food’, the Player Characters make the necessary right turn onto the unpaved road and find themselves in the crumbling, mouldering former uranium-mining town of Abattoir, West Texas (population of 850, but probably much less…). Unfortunately, getting into Abattoir, West Texas, is the easy part. Getting out is going to be challenging, not to say nigh on impossible, and is likely to be tortuous. In some cases, literally…

The fourth reason why The Highway of Blood is different, is the format. It is not a traditional Call of Cthulhu scenario in that it is a strong plot driven by an investigation, with layers of the mystery being peeled back layer by layer as the Investigators make their enquiries. Instead, it is written as a sandbox-style scenario in which the Player Characters are free to go anywhere they like, though they are likely to be harried and hindered by the evil inhabitants of Abattoir and its environs everywhere they go. To that end, The Highway of Blood describes the town and surrounding locations in some depth, including the inhabitants and the items which might be found there—sometimes on lengthy random tables. The locations include the gas station, the diner, the church, and the few surviving shops in the town itself. Then beyond the confines of the town, the roads which crisscross the area, the camp and mine shafts for the long since shutdown uranium mine, a horridly bloody compound, and below the mine, a series of strange caves and tunnels. All described in some detail and all sites which the Investigators can visit as part of their sojourn in and around Abattoir.

The plot—as much as there is a plot in The Highway of Blood—is primarily driven by two urges. One is the urge by the debased and often inbred townsfolk to harass and harry, even play, with the Player Characters, and keep them in Abattoir, whilst the other is Player Characters’ urge to escape Abattoir. The highlight of this—if there is one—is the set piece car chase over the roads surrounding the town. This is ‘The Hunt’, and it is very obviously inspired by the car chases seen in the Grindhouse genre. Beyond this hunt, the motivations and plans of the scenario’s antagonists are discussed in some detail, as are possible outcomes or endgames…

The Highway of Blood is supported by a number of appendices. The first provides an overview of ‘The Hunt’, including optional car rules to supplement the chase rules in Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition; and rules for non-lethal attacks (since the antagonists do not want to actually kill the Player Characters) and driving stunts. The second provides environment rules for the desert and various hazards; the third the full statistics and write-ups for the various NPCs; the third the monsters; and the fifth, descriptions of new spells and items, plus new rules for radioactive dust and water. The sixth gives the scenario’s various handouts, including numerous maps and floor plans, plus portraits for all of the NPCs and details of the vehicles the Player Characters and their enemies drive during the scenario. The seventh appendix provides two sets of pre-generated Player Characters. One is a quartet of twenty-somethings on a week-long road trip, whilst the other is a pair of FBI agents looking into a rash of disappearances in the area. The eighth and last appendix provides a thumbnail guide to playing in the seventies—news and pop culture in 1975, slang, and recommended films. All useful for anyone who was not born then or was too young to remember the period, or was alive back and then, and has forgotten what it was like.

So what then is The Highway of Blood actually about? It can be best described as the desert version of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. The town of Abattoir is dominated by a cult dedicated to an ancient god whose members seek victims for conception, consumption, and consecration. This is no Escape from Innsmouth though, the emphasis being on the ‘no escape’, again in keeping with the Grindhouse genre. There is a touch of Mad Max in the scenario’s set piece car chase and of Deliverance in the encounters between the Player Characters and the NPCs. Instead of hillbillies of Deliverance or the bachtrachian inbreds of Innsmouth, what The Highway of Blood has is ‘Dustbillies’. There are potential allies to be found in Abattoir, but to a man—and there are no active female NPCs in the scenario—all have either been cowed by the cult or actively choose to ignore it. This adds to the challenge of what is already a challenging scenario.

Physically, The Highway of Blood is decently appointed. It is presented in full colour with a mixture of period colour photographs and photographs, as well as black and white photographs from the nineteen thirties onwards. The floorplans are clean and easy to read, as are the maps in general. Some thought has been given to highlighting the key points in the scenario and in particular, key trigger warnings for the horrific situations in the scenario. Throughout, there is staging advice and directions for the Keeper, most notably appropriate music to play at certain points, as well as the voiceover from a state radio disc jockey. In addition to it needing an edit in places, if there is an issue with The Highway of Blood, it is that the Keeper could have been given a bigger, better map of the region and it be placed more upfront for her reference.

As a scenario, The Highway of Blood is difficult to quantify. This is because as a sandbox scenario, a form more readily seen in the Old School Renaissance rather than in Call of Cthulhu, it very much being very player driven with relatively little in the way of the plot or NPC to pull them along. In fact, the plot more pushes the Player Characters along as the inhabitants of Abattoir harass and harry them in and around, but not of, the town. In addition, the format means that unlike a traditional Call of Cthulhu scenario, there is not the readymade trail of breadcrumbs or clues for the Player Characters to follow, so that because The Highway of Blood is a sandbox, the Player Characters can more easily avoid any and all clues, run into a major threat and get captured and/or butchered in the first hour or so, or simply wander around never finding anything, just desperate to escape… So a play through of The Highway of Blood could last an hour or hours over multiple sessions. And even if the Player Characters do manage to escape, they may not necessarily succeed or find a solution which deals with the threat they face in Abattoir. That said, the players and their characters have to be both lucky and resourceful if they are to fully deal with this threat, the likelihood being that they will ultimately fail, get captured, and the scenario fades to black as the Player Characters scream in terror. Such an ending though, would be in keeping with the Grindhouse genre that The Highway of Blood is inspired by.

Ultimately, the nature of The Highway of Blood is what will make a gaming group decide whether to play it or not. The triggering issues it contains means that it is definitely one to avoid for some players, but those issues are part of the genre and the authors should be praised for addressing how to handle them as well as they do. The scenario is also less useful for a campaign, though there is advice to that end, being better suited to one-shot play. For a gaming group looking to play a grim, gritty, and gruesome Grindhouse scenario, The Highway of Blood: A Call of Cthulhu Scenario for the 1970s is the perfect choice.

City of Mist is a roleplaying game of neo-noir investigation and superhero-powered action. The intersection between the film noir and superhero genres has invariably derived from the Pulp fiction of the thirties and forties, with such characters as The Shadow or Batman, with generally low-key and low-powered heroes and villains in comparison to what would follow with the Four Colour subgenre. City of Mist does something different. It brings in the powers and personalities of legends and gods of different Mythos—King Arthur, Red Riding Hood, Hercules, Athena, and Bast—and then obscures them. These powers and personalities manifest through Rifts, inhabitants of The City, a fog-shrouded, corrupt, and crime-ridden metropolis which could be Los Angeles of the thirties, New York of the fifties, or London of the sixties. It is simply known as The City. As Rifts, the Player Characters investigate Cases, and if necessary, fight crime, some of it committed by other Rifts, some not. Yet as powerful as each Rift is, the ordinary citizens of The City, the Sleepers, cannot see them for what they are and never see them manifest their powers. The Mist, a strange mystical veil renders each manifestation of a power or legend ordinary. Wallcrawling? Parkour. Lightning bolt? Broken electrical substation. Each Mythoi—god or legend or even abstract concept wants to manifest itself in The City, but the Mist works to prevent this, for the result might be chaos which could rip The City apart, so instead it allows them to manifest through the Rifts. Equally, as there is a tension between the Mythoi and the Mist, there is tension between the Mythos, both the legend which wants to become more and a mystery as to why it manifested, and the Logos, the ordinary self, safe and mundane in each Rift.

The City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set is designed as an introduction to the setting. Published by Son of Oak Game Studio LLC, it provides everything necessary to play through at least one Case. Designed to be played by five players and a Master of Ceremonies—as the Game Master is known—the starter set comes richly appointed. There are two books labelled ‘The Players’ and ‘The Master of Ceremonies’; five pre-generated character folios, one each for Baku, Detective Enkidu, Job, Lily Chow, Iron Hans, and Tlaloc; a deck of twenty Tracking cards and a Crew Card; two twenty-two by seventeen-inch poster maps; forty-one illustrated character tokens; and two City of Mist dice—one purple Mythos die and one ivory Logos die. There is a lot on the box, all of it presented in full colour and illustrated throughout with artwork which invokes the two inspirations for City of Mist.

The starting point for the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set are five pre-generated Player Characters or Rifts. The quintet consists of Baku, Detective Enkidu, Job, Lily Chow and Iron Hans, and Tlaloc. Baku is a monster hunter, mythological Japanese chimera who hunts ghosts and devours nightmares; Detective Enkidu is an experienced police detective who hides a creature of the wild from Sumerian myth inside her which drives her to break the rules; Job is an unkillable priest whose family was killed by The City’s criminal underworld; Lily Chow is a runaway teen able to unleash Iron Hans, a magician-giant who is her companion, protector, and big brother; and Taloc is a small time crook with a gift of the gab and the power of the Aztec god of rain and water, thunder and lighting. Each of the five character folios is done on heavy, glossy card in A3-size. This does mean that there is quite a lot of information on each folio and that each folio takes up quite a bit of space on the table.

Unlike a traditional roleplaying game, a Rift is not described in terms of skills or attributes, but rather what he can do. Each of the five has the same set of Core Moves, or actions that they can attempt. What marks a Rifts out as special is the fact that he has four Themes, represented by four cards on the folio. They are divided between Mythos and Logos Themes, the legendary and the ordinary aspects of a Rift. Some Rifts have Mythos Themes than Logos Themes, and vice versa, and it is possible to lose Themes, so that a Mythos Theme might Fade and be replaced by a Logos Theme, whilst a Logos Theme might Crack and be replaced by a Mythos Theme. There are consequences to having Themes all of one type. For example, a Rift who replaces all of his Logos Themes with Mythos Themes, becomes an avatar of his Mythos, whilst losing his last Mythos Theme means he becomes a Sleeper and denies the existence of the Mythos. Whilst each Mythos Theme has a Mystery that the Rift wants to explore, and each Logos Theme has an Identity which represents a defining conviction, belief, or emotion, all Themes have Power Tags which can be invoked to help achieve a Rift’s intended goal, plus a Weakness.

For example, Tlaloc has the Mythos Theme ‘God of Rain and Lightning’. This has the Mystery, “Who Threatens to Blot Out the Fifth Sun?”, the Power Tags, ‘Call Upon the Storm’, ‘Thunderbolt Manipulation’, and ‘Electrifying Gaze’, plus the Weakness, ‘Indoor Spaces’. He also has the ‘A Dimond in the Rough’ Logos Theme, which as the Identity, “This Will Be The Last Time, I Swear!”, the Power Tags, ‘Good, deep down inside’, ‘Relentless Schmoozer’, and ‘Sticky Fingers’, as well as the Weakness, ‘Pangs of Remorse’.

Learning the game begins with ‘The Players’ booklet. It runs to forty-four pages and introduces the concepts behind roleplaying and City of Mist, explains the character folios and how the roleplaying game is played—the ‘Moves’ or actions a Rift can take and their potential outcome, describes the various districts of The City, and provides a lengthy, eight page example of play. The latter includes two of the pre-generated Rifts in the starter set and showcases the various types of Moves that the Rifts can perform as part of an investigation and then combat scene. In general, the Moves are well explained, but do come with fine print and do require a little bit of study. The example of play though, is more than helpful in showing the prospective player and Master of Ceremonies how the game works.

Whilst the Master of Ceremonies has to read the ‘The Players’ book to understand the basics of City of Mist, the ‘The Master of Ceremonies’ book is all hers. This explains the role of the Master of Ceremonies, the Moves or actions she can take—and when, explains how to present challenges and dangers to the Rifts, and so on. A Danger encapsulates a threat to the Rifts, whether that is an NPC, a location, or a situation, which might be a crime lord’s chief enforcer, a car chase through the streets of The City, or a building on fire. The bulk of the ‘The Master of Ceremonies’ book is given over to ‘Shark Tank’, the first case for ‘All-Seeing Eye Investigations’, the crew which the Rifts in the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set are members of. ‘All-Seeing Eye Investigations’ has its own ‘Crew Theme card, complete with its own Mystery and Power Tags which the Rifts can invoke as part of their investigation.

Mechanically, City of Mist and thus the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set is ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’, which means that it uses the rules first seen in Apocalypse World in 2010. These rules are player-facing in that the Master of Ceremonies does not make dice rolls, but rather that the player do. So from the Core Moves below, a player would roll ‘Convince’ to persuade an NPC, but ‘Face Danger’ to avoid being influenced. The rules in City of Mist have eight Core Moves—‘Change The Game’ (give an advantage or remove a disadvantage), , ‘Face Danger’ (avoid harm or resist a malign influence), ‘Go Toe to Toe’ with someone, ‘Hit With All You’ve Got’ (harm someone in the worst way you can), ‘Investigate’, ‘Sneak Around’, and ‘Take the Risk’ (perform a feat of daring). When a Rift undertakes an action, his player states the Move he is using, applies any bonuses from Tags—short descriptors for a quality, resource, advantage, disadvantage, or object in the game—and applies the resulting Power value for the sum of positive and negative tags and statuses affecting an action, and rolls two six-sided (or the included City of Mist dice) dice. A player can use all manner of Tag Combos to build up the Power value, as long as the Master of Ceremonies agrees. Several Tag Combos tailored to each pre-generated Rift are listed in their respective folios.

A result of a six or less is a Miss, a result of between seven and nine is a Hit, but with complications, whilst a result of ten or more is a Hit with a great success. Each Move works slightly differently and will give different results depending upon the roll. For example, the ‘Investigate’ Move gets a Rift answers to questions. If a Hit—seven or more—is rolled, the player can ask the Master of Ceremonies a number of questions and so gain a number of Clues equal to the Power value applied to the roll. If a Hit with complications—seven or more, but less than ten—is rolled, the Master of Ceremonies can expose the Rift to danger, give fuzzy, incomplete, or partly-true partly-false answers, or have the NPC ask the Rift a question, which he must answer. The aim in many Moves is to inflict a Status such as ‘Prone-2’ or ‘Befuddled-1’ or ‘Knife Wound-3’, which will give a Rift an advantage when rolling against that NPC who has suffered such a Status and a disadvantage when suffered by the Rift. A status like this is recorded on a Status card and kept in play until it is got rid of.

In addition, the Rifts can enter a Downtime sequence between the investigation or action, and undertake actions such as ‘Give Attention to a Logos’, ‘Work the Case’, ‘Explore Your Mythos’, ‘Prepare for your next Activity’, and ‘Recover for your next Activity’. This is handled as a montage scene and the effects of each action are automatic, whilst ‘Burning for a Hit’ grants an automatic success without complications, but also makes the Tag unusable until a Downtime sequence has been completed. Lastly, there is ‘Stop.Holding.Back.’, a special Move which enables a Rift to push his powers beyond their limit, though at the cost of a sacrifice to one of the Themes in a Rift’s folio.

The Master of Ceremonies has her own Moves, divided between Soft Moves and Hard Moves. A Soft Move is an imminent threat or challenge to the Rifts and their investigation, and really only consists of the Master of Ceremonies complicating things for the Rifts as a means to spur them into action. A Hard Move is a major complication or a significant setback to the Rifts and their investigation, and includes more options for the Master of Ceremonies. ‘Give a Status’ inflicts a Status on a Rift, but this can be resisted by a ‘Face Danger’ Move. Other Hard Moves, such as ‘Burn a Tag’, ‘Complicate Things, Big-time’, and others cannot be resisted and are more narrative effects and consequences than Moves as such. Essentially, they can come into play when a Rift fails to take an action or fails—rolls six or less—when undertaking an action. The Master of Ceremonies also has Intrusions, which really codify her using her judgement when adjudicating the rules.

The Case in the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set, ‘Shark Tank’ is organised in a couple of ways. First, it is a pyramid diagram of scenes, arranged by depth into a series of layers, which after the briefing, the Rifts can visit and investigate. Second, it is as a series of programmed steps which take the Master of Ceremonies and her players through the process of learning to play both City of Mist and the scenario. For example, when the Rifts encounter a group of enforcers shaking down a shop owner, ‘The Master of Ceremonies’ book says, “If this is the crew’s first fight, stop the story and move over to the players’ booklet, starting at Exhibit #8: Playing Through a Conflict on page 21 (see also MC Skill: Running a Fight Scene on the next page).” At which point, the players and Master of Ceremonies can set up and run the fight scene. However, this does not mean that the Master of Ceremonies can necessarily run ‘Shark Tank’ without any preparation, but it does mean that once prepared, she really has all of the references, pointers, and advice at her fingertips, including advice specific to each of the five Rifts which come pre-generated with the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set. The scenario itself has the Rifts interviewing the owners of several businesses on Miller’s Square where All-Seeing Eye Investigations has its shabby office, potentially exposing police corruption, confronting villains who bring a whole new meaning to the term ‘loan shark’, and having a showdown at the chief villain’s lair. Beyond the confines of ‘Shark Tank’, there are extra scenarios available which can be played using the content from the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set.

Also included in the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set are two twenty-two by seventeen-inch poster maps and forty-one illustrated character tokens. The maps depict various locations which appear in the scenario, ‘Shark Tank’, and tokens cover all five Rifts and the various NPCs in the scenario. The single purple Mythos die and single ivory Logos die are decent twelve-sided dice marked with one through five twice, and then the domino mask symbol on the six face for the Logos die, and power icon on the six face for the Mystery die. Each icon also appears on the Themes in each folio.

Physically, the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set is very nicely put together. The poster maps are on sturdy paper, the counters thick cardboard, the folios on glossy card stock, and both of ‘The Players’ and ‘The Master of Ceremonies’ booklets done on glossy paper stock. Inside, both booklets are superbly illustrated in a slightly cartoonish, but suitably film noir style, and their layout is excellent. Not only designed to look like a set of case files for a crime, but also designed to be accessible with effective use of devices to highlight text and boxed text for useful information. If there is a physical downside to the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set, it is the box it comes in. It is not particularly sturdy and unlikely to do a good job of protecting its otherwise excellent contents.

The City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set is at first confusing. The box contains a lot of components and it is a little difficult to quite know where to start. However, once you dig into the rules in the ‘The Players’ booklet it begins to make a little sense, but really where it comes together is in ‘The Master of Ceremonies’ booklet, especially in the scenario, ‘Shark Tank’, which gives context for the rules and whether through nudges to the Master of Ceremonies to use particular rules or direct referral back to the rules in ‘The Players’ booklet. Once grasped, what the City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set reveals is a flexible ruleset which drives and pushes the narrative. The setting itself, combines urban fantasy with super heroics, but that combination avoids much of the trappings of the superhero genre. It shrouds them in the fog of the film noir genre just as The Mist masks The City from them. The City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set is an excellent introduction to The City and the ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ mechanics of City of Mist.

Another fairly notorious one.  I can recall gamers in my Jr. High talking about how to stat up the sword from this.  The start of this one is fun, love the wall of screaming faces.

Among others, this features Richard Lynch as Titus Cromwell the evil king (naturally) and Richard Moll as Xusia the evil sorcerer.  On the side of good, we get Lee Horsley as Prince Talon just before he became Matt Houston and Kathleen Beller, the future Mrs. Thomas Dolby*, as Princess Alana.

I only mention her as the "future Mrs. Thomas Dolby" because that was my first real knowledge of her, on the cover of his "Aliens Ate My Buick" album.  

So let's get to this!

The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)

So Richard Lynch summons Richard Moll to help him fight King Richard (Christopher Cary).  Of course, no sooner had he got help from the sorcerer Xusia, Cromwell kills him. 

We also get our first look at the ridiculous three-bladed sword. It can cut, slice, and fire blades! 

Eleven years later Talon (now looking like Lee Horsley) comes back home to avenge his father and mother. 

There is a bit with Manimal I mean Prince Mikah played by Simon MacCorkindale and George Maharis, a long way from Route 66, as Machelli.  We also get another showing of S&S&C MVP Anthony De Longis appears as Rodrigo.  

I have never watched it all the way through.  I honestly could never get past the sword firing blades.  Watching it now I remember why.

The prince is rescued but they fight their way out. There seems to be a bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark envy here; Talon's escape could be taking place in Cario, Egypt. 

Talon fights Cromwell only to have Xusia come back.  I have to admit Xusia's return is kind of fun, it would have been better if they hadn't telegraphed it. Xusia and Talon fight over who gets to kill Cromwell.  Talon kills the sorcerer and then he and Cromwell fight.

Not a great movie but a cult film all the same. I know a lot of people love it, but I could not get into it in the 80s and didn't do much better now.

Gaming Content

Seems fitting seeing how they call out D&D on the poster and there is not a dragon to be found in this.

The Triple-Sword.  This sword is +3 to hit and damage.  On striking it does 3d6+3 points of damage. 
The sword can launch one of two of its outside blades doing 1d6+3 damage.  Its range is 30/60/120 feet.  Reattaching a blade requires one round in which the wielder cannot attack. 

The Future We Saw is a near-future, post-scarcity, post-labour roleplaying game of A.I. and precognitive manipulation of politics, power, privacy, and information in a world of radical political, corporate, and social factions. This is a future in which corporations and other organisations not only have their own public relations teams to make themselves look good, but teams of undercover fixers whose task is to ensure that their employer looks good and their employer’s rival looks bad, that they have the inside information on their rivals, whilst denying inside information to their rivals. Working in small team ‘Special Forces’ style operations, these fixers will conduct acts of blackmail and kompromat, assassination and intimidation, infiltration and hacking, extraction and kidnapping, sabotage and discovery, and more. Each team will comprise combat and protection Veterans, technical Specialists, Psy-Ops who provide medical and psychological support, and Seers, precogs capable of seeing Glimpses and Gazes into the possible future, and so potentially avoid them—though not without suffering high degrees of stress such that it is not uncommon for Seers to burn out.

The Future We Saw is published by Lost Pages, best known for its Old School Renaissance titles such as Genial Jack Vol. I and the Burgs & Bailiffs series. It employs the mechanics from Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition to provide four Classes—each of which goes up to Fifth Level, near-future skill and tool Proficiencies, and the spell-like Glimpses and Gazes of the Seer. In addition, it covers the types of factions found tomorrow—if not today—and the means to set up a Scheme, or campaign, in which factions will send teams on Missions against their rivals to gain or prevent leverage, perhaps discovering other information, which will lead to further Missions, and so on. Lastly it includes a campaign setting, set-up, and scenario in tomorrow’s Dublin written by the author of Macchiato Monsters: Rules for Adventures In a Dungeonverse You Build Together.

The Future We Saw is not a Cyberpunk roleplaying game. Not only does it lack the chrome and neon aesthetics, it is not about technology and our inability to integrate with it, and it is not about the masses versus megacorporations or working to bring them down. The various factions in The Future We Saw are in power, so it is about sabotaging them, manipulating them, and controlling them rather than destroying them, and all for the benefit of another faction rather than society. The Future We Saw is about the manipulation of a future that has already been lost to the control of corporations and other factions whose promises have failed to deliver as discourse polarised and technology either drove out the need for labour or began to direct it. What technology there is has been subsumed into society, whether that is robot delivery drones or mobile devices or A.I.-driven vehicles—essentially all recognisable from today, and in terms of game play there are no hacking rules. Instead hacking is handled offscreen by an NPC, if at all. However, labour is at least useful for providing a human face, or stepping in when A.I. cannot cope or needs to be repaired, but in the main, robots do much of the work. However, constant working with A.I. has caused mental illness in many, even triggering a precognitive ability in some. Typically, this comes in the form of a hallucination which suggests the best possible outcome, but not whether the action will succeed, such that the powers of a Seer are powerful, but not absolute. However, such predictions, known as Sights, can fail due to errors in belief, the blurring of details, focus upon incidental details, and personal bias as well as the Seer’s mental health.

An Agent in The Future We Saw has the six attribute scores of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Each of the four Agent Classes grants various Proficiencies—Saving Throws, Armour, Weapons, and Skills, as well as a series of features. For example, the Specialist starts with Expertise—double Proficiency with two skills and Specialist Training. This can be Thug, essentially the equivalent of the Rogue’s Backstab; Contacts, which grants Advantage on Charisma checks when dealing with criminal contacts; or Meaningful Practice, which grants a bonus action with one particular tool the Agent has Proficiency with. Two means of Agent creation are given. One is an array for the ‘Typical Professional’, whilst the standard three six-sided dice are rolled for those ‘From Other Walks of Life’. An Agent then receives some bonuses to these and then selects a Class. An Agent does not begin with equipment as this is provided by his employer on a Mission by Mission basis.

Marilyn Hilliard was an actuary working for Solid Life Health Insurance supporting an expert A.I. when she began to see the times of deaths of her customers. This drove her into having a mental health episode and eventually hospital. Her policy and employment was subsequently purchased from Solid Life Health Insurance and she found herself working for an entirely different employer.

Marilyn Hilliard
First Level Seer

Strength 12 (+1)
Constitution 06 (-2)
Dexterity 13 (+1)
Intelligence 14 (+2)
Wisdom 18 (+4)
Charisma 16 (+3)

Hit Points 7

Proficiencies: Light Armour, Simple Weapons
Saving Throws: Intelligence, Wisdom
Skills: Insight, Investigation, Persuasion

Features
Stress Prevision (People)
Future Sight: Emotional Button Mashing, Evil Eye (Glimpses); Alpha-Beta Approach Pruning (Gazes)

A Seer’s capacity to see into the future is divided into ‘Glimpses’ and ‘Gazes’. ‘Glimpses’ grant visions of the future about the Seer’s immediate environment—to see how a combat plays out to pre-empt an action, to determine how a conversation might play out, or to predict the worst possible outcome from a situation. In general, this is to gain a bonus action, a reaction, and so on. ‘Gazes’ take longer, often days at a time, and grant long range predictions, perhaps about the plans of a rival faction or the best possible course of action. Although The Future We Saw does not have hacking rules or mechanics, but the difference between ‘Glimpses’ and ‘Gazes’ maps onto the shift on how hacking is handled in cyberpunk and similar roleplaying games. Originally, hacking was always handled by a Player Character working from a base or home whilst the rest of the team goes on the Mission, essentially ‘Gazes’, but in more recent iterations, hacking needs to be done on scene, that is, the hacker has to go on the Mission. Which is this case, the equivalent of the ‘Glimpses’, visions of the future which happen on site, during the Mission. Predicting the future does not come without its cost. Invoking ‘Glimpses’ and ‘Gazes’ inflicts stress and suffering stress can led to burnout and exhaustion, which can greatly impede an Agent’s capacity to operate. Combat is also dangerous in The Future We Saw as it is possible to suffer grisly wounds.

Ideally, The Future We Saw should be played with four players and thus one of each of the four Agent types in the roleplaying game, though with more players, the doubled up Agents should opt for different specialities to enable each Agent to shine in different ways during play. Doubling up with Seer Agents may set up an interesting dynamic of differing views of the immediate future, but will also complicate the efforts of the Game Master to what that ‘best’ future might be in any given situation. Even with just the one Seer in a team, determining the ‘best’ future might be in any given situation is still one of the more challenging tasks in the roleplaying game for the Game Master.

In terms of setting, The Future We Saw does three things. First it presents and discusses five Factions—Hegemon, Innovator, Movement, Rentier, and Zaibatzu—and what their objectives are, why they are hated and why they are useful, and the three perks they can grant once per Mission. For example, an Innovator represents the Power of Progress, which could be cutting edge technology, pervasive data hoarders and manipulators, and the like, such as gig economy delivery and taxi services, and political consulting firms specialising in data analysis and manipulation. It is hated because it pursues improvements without any qualms about collateral or financial damage, but useful because it is building the future. Their perks include ‘Benefit: SIGINT’—harvesting data means great briefing material, Support: Cutting Edge—new technology; and Ultimate: Hack from the Stash—the possibility that the data breaches have already made in the target of the Mission, but not yet revealed. A diagram shows the relationships between the five types of Factions, so that the Game Master can see the alliances and enmities at a glance.

Second, it examines the types of Missions and Schemes that the Agents can be sent on. Whether an Extraction, Cover-Up, or Kompromat, Missions are played out in seven phases—Briefing, Procurement (assign equipment), Deployment, Execution, Extraction, Debriefing, and Consequences. What is interesting here is that in terms of game play, failure is as interesting as success, since the target Faction (or other Faction) might be running its own team of Agents and failure means approaching the problem again, but from a different angle, even a different type of Mission. Further, throughout the Game Master has her own character to roleplay in addition to the various NPCs in situ, and that is Control, a voice in the Agents’ ears, offering advice, help, and warnings, a la Control of John le Carre’s espionage fiction.

Schemes are the overall objectives of the Faction the Agents are working for, the equivalent of a campaign in other roleplaying games, but relatively short and meant to be flexible and be developed as the Agents play through Missions, make discoveries and the target Factions acts in response. These are mapped out on a ‘FTM’ or ‘Faction Tension Map’, which sets out the specific relationships between the Factions and other organisations or persons involved in the Scheme, willing or not. The relative brevity is supported by the number of Missions the Agents go on to acquire Levels—two Missions to get to Second Level, then three to get to Third Level, and so on, for a maximum of fourteen Missions to get to Fifth Level, the maximum available in The Future We Saw.

Third, The Future We Saw presents a Scheme setting, ‘Dublin 2020’. It details a city divided by wealth and a security Fence, dominated by corporate interests, alco-tourism, and tax breaks. It is supported by complete scenario, ‘L❤VE’s Data’s Lost’, in which the Agents are working for L❤VE, an Innovator and start-up company desperately on the make whose data, much of it private and harvested from its app, has been hacked into on the servers at a nearby server farm. The Faction responsible, ZPLNTR, a radical hacker group, is holding the data hostage and the Agents’ task is to prevent further leaks and get control of the data back. Mix in rival Factions, rival events, and more, and this is a decent starting Scheme which feels just a little too real.

Currently, The Future We Saw is only available in an ‘Ashcan’ or ‘Zero Edition’. This does not mean that it is roughly presented. The layout is clean and tidy, and there is a lot of white space. This is by design, and whilst some may complain, it does give the content room to breath and it makes it easy to read. The artwork is decent and though it needs a slight edit in places, the book is well written.

The Future We Saw is a heist roleplaying game, a roleplaying of small teams of experts conducting missions in small amounts of time. It is like the television series Leverage or Hustle, but with a twist. It is like those television series, but backwards—or rather forwards. In Leverage, the team achieves its aims, playing out a con on its mark, but how the mark is played, how each switch or misdirection is made, is revealed in flashbacks, showcasing the skills and abilities of the team’s members. In The Future We Saw, there are no flashbacks, but there are flashforwards, quick peeks and squints mostly into the immediate future(s), and they occur throughout the mission rather than at the beginning or the end.

Overall, The Future We Saw is an interesting take upon the heist and the post-cyberpunk roleplaying game, set in a tomorrow that we can already see.

In the nineteenth century there remained much of the world to be explored and discovered, so men and women would set out to chart and catalogue the great unknowns in Africa, Asia, and South America. Many would be sponsored by august bodies such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, and Société de Géographie, as well as many museums, and in turn the most successful of explorers would return with tales of their explorations, bringing back with them charts of where they have been, fantastic animals and beautiful plants, amazing treasures, and even lost explorers. They would go on to be famous, whilst their sponsors—the societies and the museums—would gain prestige, able to conduct greater scientific work and open greater exhibits to the public. This is the set-up for Exploriana, a board game of exploration and discovery, published by Triple Ace Games, following a successful Kickstarter campaign in which august scientific bodies will send out intrepid explorers and naturalists to chart and catalogue the world, and come back with great discoveries. Each player is the head of one these scientific bodies, who Recruits and sends out Explorers to the far flung corners of the world where they explore regions, and make and return with discoveries that the scientific organisations so covet. It combines ‘Card Drafting’, ‘Push Your Luck’, ‘Set Collection’, and ‘Worker Placement’ mechanics, is designed for between two and five players, aged fourteen and up, and takes roughly forty-five to sixty minutes to play.

Fundamentally, Exploriana consists of five decks of cards and four boards. Three of the decks of cards are Region decks, consisting of Discovery cards, one each for Africa, Asia, and South America. Each Region deck has an associated Region board. The fourth board is the Renown/Score Track, whilst the fourth and fifth decks of cards consist of Explorer cards and Mission cards respectively. Each Discovery card in a Region deck indicates its type—Animal, Location, Treasure, Map, or Orchid, as well as the number of Victory Points it awards at game’s end, Renown for determining turn order, coins it awards, and potentially the Hazard it presented in acquiring. The three types of Hazard are ‘Wrong Turn’, ‘Animal Attack’, and ‘Rockfall’. If a player reveals the three different or three of the same Hazard types during a turn exploring, his turn is over. The three Region deck decks vary in terms of risk and reward, with South America having the lowest and Asia the highest.

The Explorer cards consist of individuals like the Entrepreneur who can draw new Mission cards and choose open to keep, the Medic who can turn over the top card of a Discovery deck and if has one, can ignore the Hazard it reveals, and the Photographer who can take two cards from a Region. Explorer cards are recruited in the first phase of each turn, but each has a cost to be paid if a player wants to use their effects, and an Explore card is discarded after use. Each Mission card has a task such as ‘My Hero!’ (rescuing three or more lost explorers), ‘Bloomin’ Marvelous!’ (collect a set of orchids, one of each type), and ‘Location, Location, Location!’ (collection a location from each of the three different Regions. Each Mission card awards four Victory Points.

Each of the three Region boards has spaces to place the players’ Explorer pawns and Lost Explorer tokens. They are also double-sided, one side being for two to four players and the other for five players. The Renown/Score Track is used to keep track of the players’ Renown throughout the game. Both Renown/Score Track and the three Region boards are designed to click together jigsaw fashion to form one long board.

Set-up of Exploriana is simple enough. The Renown/Score Track and the three Region boards are placed in a line down the table and the three Region decks shuffled and placed alongside them with three cards in reserve on one side and the rest on the other. Two cards from each deck are drawn and placed face up so that everyone can see them. Each player is given his two Explorer pawns, six coins, and two Missions, which will score them Victory Points if completed.

Each round of Exploriana consists of four phases. Turn order goes from the highest Renown to the lowest, but at the game’s beginning, the player who most recently travelled to another continent goes first. In the ‘Recruit Explorers’ phase, the players each choose one Explorer card from those face up. There is always one more Explorer card than the number of players and any Explorer card left has a coin added to it. A player who takes an Explorer card with coins on it, also gets the coins. This can be a consideration as players rarely have quite enough coins necessary to hire their Explorers and use their abilities. In the ‘Send Explorers’ phase, the players take in turns to assign one of their Explorer pawns, then the other, onto one or two of the Region boards. A player can only explore a Region deck if he has an Explorer pawn on the associated Region board. It is possible to completely fill the spaces on a Region board, forcing a player to place his Explorer pawn elsewhere.

Then, starting on the South America Region board and moving to the Africa Region board and then the Asia Region board, each player takes any number of actions for one of his Explorer pawns in the third phase, Explore Regions’, before going round again for each player’s second Explorer pawn. There are three types of action a player can take. First, he can ‘Explore’, turning over cards from the Region deck adjacent to Region board; second, he can ‘Hire a guide’, every player having a guide token he can use to cover a Hazard symbol on a face-up Region card, though this costs coins; and third, ‘Use an Explorer card’, a simple matter of following its instructions. A player’s turn with one Explorer pawn continues until one of four conditions are met. Either three different or three of the same Hazard types are revealed face-up on the Region cards, in which case the Explorer becomes lost and a random Lost Explorer token is added to the Region board and all of the face up Region cards in the Region are shuffled back into the Region deck, and two cards are drawn again. Lost Explorer tokens are worth two, three, or four Victory Points, and are placed face down. Either because there are five face-up Region cards adjacent to the Region board or the player decides to stop exploring, or because an Explorer card tells the player to stop.

If there are five face-up Region cards or the player decided to stop exploring, and there are not sufficient Hazard types revealed face-up to get the player lost, the last action he gets to do is ‘Take Picks’. If there are four or fewer Regions face-up to choose from, a player only gets one pick, but if there are five, he gets two. A pick can either be all of the Region cards with Animal symbols on them in the Region, a single Region card with a non-Animal symbol on it (Location, Treasure, Map, or Orchid), or a single Lost Explorer token on the Region Board. A player can then repeat this all with his second Explorer pawn, in either the same Region or a different one, depending upon where it is placed.

The fourth and last phase of a round is ‘End of the Round’. It is actually only triggered when any Region deck or its reserve pile, or the Explorer deck is depleted, and indicates the end of the game. Each player is awarded Victory Points for the number of Renown points scored, Mission cards completed, Lost Explorer tokens, coins, and Region cards with Location and Treasure symbols collected, for each Animal on their Region cards collected, the number of Map symbols collected, and the number of sets of Region cards with Orchid symbols collected. The player with the most Victory Points is the winner.

Essentially, each player is attempting to push his luck when exploring a Region and turning over its Region cards, attempting to find the Region cards he wants that will score him the most points or helps him fulfil the requirements of a Mission card. This is balanced against the possibility of too many Hazard symbols being revealed, and so making an Explorer lost, as well as the need to find coins which a player will need to pay in order to use the special ability of an Explorer card. The first player to any Region—typically dictated by Renown order—has the benefit of making use of the first two cards face-up in a Region, thematically, the equivalent of entering undiscovered territory. Later players will probably find that the face-up Region cards have changed, potentially with the best Region cards already having been picked or too many Region cards with Hazard symbols left to be revealed. The ‘Set Collection’ aspect of the game involves getting as many Region cards with Map symbols or sets of the three types of Orchid symbols on the Region cards. A last aspect of the game’s ‘Push Your Luck’ play, is whether or not to Explore the more dangerous Regions of Africa or Asia, which have higher rewards, but more risks in the form of a greater number of Hazard symbols.

Beyond the race to place Explorer pawns in choice slots on the Region boards, Exploriana is not a game with any real direct interaction between the players. This does not mean that it is a bad game however, rather that its competitive play is relatively gentle and probably suited to a younger audience than the minimum age of fourteen years old already given. Certainly twelve-year-olds would have no issue with relative complexities of Exploriana and those complexities are not that complex. Further, the playing time of forty-five minutes to an hour is a little long, except for the first playthrough perhaps. After that, it should play in thirty minutes or so.

That though, is the basic game. Exploriana includes much more than just the basic game. For two players, it adds a dummy third player to act as a rival, though this is not as enjoyable to play, and then there are several advanced rules and variants. These add valuable relics which can be discovered by collecting particular symbols for the Region the relic is from; a bonus of two coins for Explorer pawns which become lost, which encourages a player to actually push his luck even further exploring a Region and drawing cards; and Expansion cards which are taken as soon as they are drawn, such as the Poisoned Chalice which is given to another player (and later possibly to another player when an Explorer becomes lost) and losing the player who has it at the end of the game Victory Points. There are a total of nine advanced options and variants, which the players are free to pick and choose from, and that is in addition to the solo rules and variants included. Adding these to the play of the game will increase its play length though.

Physically, Exploriana is very well presented. A good cardstock is used for all of the cards, the playing pieces and tokens are of thick cardboard or wood, and everything is done in full colour. The rulebook is generally well written, but needs a careful read through in places.

Exploriana is quite a light game, with scope to make it as complex as the players want, but without getting overly so. Its engaging theme, attractive production values, and light mechanics make it a decent family game as well as something that can be enjoyed by the more experienced boardgamer too.

Alex Adams / March 25, 2021

Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is perhaps the most widely praised Kaiju film ever made. A special effects masterpiece at the time, the monochrome mother of all monster movies had bleak, fume-laden visuals, a gloomy, mournful tone, and an unambiguous anti-nuclear message. Even its conclusion, in which the pained Dr. Serizawa unleashes his hyper-toxic Oxygen Destroyer to finally rid Japan of its avenging lizard king, sees no redemption, as the weapon that banishes the beast also irreversibly poisons the Earth. Godzilla is rightly remembered as a serious, somber, and politically insightful cinematic monument with a powerful message and internationally historical significance. Its first dozen or so sequels, however, are quite another matter—a different beast, you could say.

For Godzilla would not remain an icon of manmade devastation for long. In the course of the next two decades, Godzilla would grow from a nightmarish God of Destruction into mankind’s dependable, child-friendly ally. “The dragon has become St. George,” wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby on the 1976 US release of Godzilla Vs. Megalon, in which Godzilla defends the Earth against the giant cockroach Megalon and his sinister ally, the buzzsaw-chested robot chicken Gigan. Godzilla’s role as the bane of modern Japan would be assumed by the many Kaiju successors he confronted, and the beast who had once embodied the apocalypse would now stand heroically between his antagonists and their desire to destroy the Earth.

Varying wildly in tone, the corpus of movies from the Shōwa era of the Godzilla series veers vertiginously between family-friendly entertainments—such as All Monsters Attack (1969), Son of Godzilla (1966), and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1964)—and the more adult tone evident in the environmentalist psychedelia of Godzilla Vs. Hedorah (1971) or the WrestleMania spectacles of Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). These movies are fondly remembered by fans for their rough and ready practical special effects, their cartoonish, preposterous pugilism, and their deliriously inventive storytelling, which could use anything at all as the pretext for a monster battle—from an insect invasion of the Earth to a 24-hour dance competition.

Nevertheless, their lack of the thematic seriousness and visual restraint so evident in Honda’s first film means that they are often looked down on as a silly dilution of the original movie, a goofy world cinema novelty of interest only to kids, nerds, or the sort of weirdo who used to load up on caffeine and stay up late to watch men in rubber suits wrestling on cheaply painted sound stages. Naturally I, as just such a weirdo, think that this sneering, while understandable, underplays a great deal of the sophistication and interest of these wacky, silly, excellently distracting films. Not simply the impoverishment of a once-grand icon in the pursuit of ever-dwindling box office returns (although Toho has certainly never been shy of ruthlessly commercially exploiting Godzilla), Godzilla’s evolution from cosmic punishment to benevolent savior also makes him one of the most interesting, flexible, and dynamic popular cultural icons of the Cold War years.

Rumble in the Jungle: King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

King Kong vs. Godzilla is perhaps the best remembered of the Shōwa-era Godzilla movies, after the original Godzilla. The first time either creature would be seen in color, it remains the most successful and popular Godzilla movie to this day, in terms of ticket sales at least, perhaps due to the way in which it was marketed—almost like a high-stakes boxing match or wrestling bout. The genius of its combination of two iconic monsters at a time when both of them still remained fearful beasts, rather than comic or heroic figures, was powerful enough for the movie to remain a genre high-water mark for years to come.

This double-headliner structure, in which two A-list monsters were brought together in order to double the appeal of the movie, would initiate a run of versus battles that would last for over a decade. From 1964 onwards, Toho produced at least one Godzilla movie every year until the financial failure of Terror of Mechagodzilla drew the franchise to a screeching halt in 1975. Though Godzilla had fought against the Ankylosaur Kaiju Anguirus seven years earlier in Godzilla Raids Again (1956), it would be King Kong Vs. Godzilla that truly cemented the formal template for the many monster clashes to come: on some pretext or other, Godzilla would face off against invading life forms from outer space, such as his arch-nemesis King Ghidorah, or against creatures with more Earthly origins, such as the mysterious and oddly beautiful Mothra, the sea-monster Ebirah, or, indeed, the American myth King Kong.

At the same time as it is great knockabout fun at face value, the “versus movie” format also provides a tremendously flexible and rich conceptual palette for filmmakers to engage with social and political ideas. In his extraordinary book of mini-essays Mythologies (1957), French critic Roland Barthes observes that amateur wrestling is a kind of broad-brush theater in which good and evil battle for symbolic supremacy. “In the ring,” he writes, “wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” The very simplicity and crudeness of the drama, he writes, is what makes these bouts transcendent. Further, he claims, its ramshackle nature—and the foundational role of the audience’s gleeful suspension of disbelief—also means that its value as symbolic play is brought to the forefront: “There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations.”

So it is in the Kaiju clash film, that unique brand of spectacle cinema that shares many formal and thematic traits with wrestling as well as other Japanese cultural forms such as anime and manga. The bold, lurid language of gesture, the vivid play of symbol and myth, and their open environmentalist and anti-nuclear ethical commitments make them a kind of powerful moral theater, at once sublime and ridiculous, at once ostentatiously silly and deathly serious. Crucially, it is equally redundant to point out that the special effects are unconvincing in King Kong Vs. Godzilla as it is to point out that wrestling is “not real” or that a play is made up (or indeed, that your Extreme Noise Terror record features a lot of shouting—what exactly did you expect?). What matters is not verisimilitude, or even a coherently sequential narrative, but the experience of grand moments of sensory power, scenes of epic destruction and wrenching pathos, and the realization of overwhelming visions of primal, fantastical worlds previously not imaginable.

You don’t, after all, go to a film about wrestling monsters expecting subtlety. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that they are without content. Even the original Godzilla derives its power from its total commitment to the enactment of one broad, bold idea.

The Meaning of Monstrosity

Toho’s first Godzilla film had such a potent social and political message that the creature would always be thought of in semiotic terms, always interpreted as a metaphor for the pressing concerns of the time. The subsequent Shōwa films, though, are chaotically flexible in this regard, and Godzilla cannot be read consistently as any kind of fixed or coherent symbol from film to film. More often, it is his foes who “embody” some social or political force against which the Earth needs to be defended, whether it is arms-race militarism (Mechagodzilla), pollution (Hedorah), renewed atomic testing (Megalon), or intergalactic imperialism (King Ghidorah, Gigan). Most of all, though, in his initial incarnation at least, Godzilla represents the unstoppable force, the mute, brute power of nature, the principle of sheer indestructibility.

This characterization of Godzilla remains, for many, the most compelling. Shusuke Kaneko, director of Millennium-era fan favorite Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), famously commented that Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood interpretation of Godzilla was disappointing in part because of its fear of American ordnance. “Americans seem unable to accept a creature,” he said, “that cannot be put down by their arms.” (Rather than an adaptation of the Toho legend of the mysterious force of nature, Emmerich’s version recalls nothing more than the climax of the previous year’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World, in which a T-Rex runs amok in San Diego.) Godzilla is at his most attractive when he is at his ugliest, when he embodies a total disaster that can be momentarily deflected but never truly defeated.

In “Mammoth,” the 74th essay in Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor Adorno writes that “the desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life.” Adorno’s reflections on the appeal of prehistoric beasts have more than a little relevance to Toho’s reptilian colossus. Very often Godzilla is conceived of as the resistance or revenge of the natural world, an embodiment of nature’s apocalyptic judgement upon mankind, a kind of demonic scourge unleashed by the obscure yet vengeful conscience of the wronged planet. He retains this character in King Kong Vs. Godzilla—when he bursts out of an iceberg at the start of the movie, nobody is pleased that he has arisen from his slumber to save the day, as would happen in later films. Here, he is a wild, unpredictable cataclysm that cannot be stopped, a symbol of the natural world’s dominance over us and its indifferent ability to survive us.

Kong, too, is no stranger to social and political interpretations. There is a long and distinguished critical tradition of reading King Kong as a problematic and racist engagement with themes related to slavery, imperialism, and moral panics about Black masculinity and sexuality. Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original, which draws heavily on the representational traditions of lost world adventure fiction, is widely considered to be an allegory of slavery and imperial exploitation, a tragic parable of man’s ruthless, irreverent, and self-involved abuse of the world’s majestic wildness. John Guillermin’s 1976 US version would more explicitly locate the story in the context of petropolitics, as the colonizing expedition to Skull Island is motivated not by a desire to capture a mythic beast but, more prosaically perhaps, to drill for oil. When Peter Jackson remade the movie in 2005, he made it a satire of the entertainment industry, casting Carl Denham as a roguish, self-destructive genius, an Orson Welles figure whose visionary talent threatens to destroy all of those near to him, and whose pledges to complete his work in the honor of the people who died in its course recalls the increasingly desperate dedications of documentarian-cum-unintentional-murderer Remy in 1992’s Man Bites Dog. For Jackson, Denham is like Kong, an unstoppable and doomed force of nature who destroys by loving.

Every Hollywood version of the original story, though, however sophisticated, simultaneously exploits the persistent racist panic about Black male desire for white women that is embedded into the fabric of the story. King Kong is, at its heart, a story about the violent death that inevitably looms at the horizon of Kong’s love for human women, a fable that has always been read as a racist allegory of the tragedy and illegitimacy of Black men’s supposedly insatiable appetite for the love of white women.

King Kong Vs. Godzilla is no exception here, as Kong’s storyline fuses critique of corporate colonialism with a problematic representation of Black desire. The characters’ extractivist plunder of Kong’s home island—changed from the enigmatic and unlocatable Skull Island to Pharaoh Island, a fictionalized landmass among the Solomon Islands—is the incident that prompts the confrontation between the two legendary beasts, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical execs who exploit Pharaoh Island for its pleasantly intoxicating fruit are shown as single-minded, hubristic buffoons as they capture Kong with the insane intent of using him to advertise their company. The clash of titans still makes time for a comedic critique of the ruthlessness of the capitalist advertising industry; so too does it retain Kong’s fascination with human women, as he scales a government building while clinging to a beautiful young woman he has captured.

The natives of Skull Island, too, are always a problem for these films. From Cooper’s original painted tribe of Kong-worshippers, to Jackson’s violent brutes (who recall the Uruk-Hai orcs from his Lord of the Rings trilogy), to the noble savages of 2017’s Kong: Skull Island (who recall Kurtz’s sinister and silent tribe in 1979’s Apocalypse Now), the human inhabitants of Kong’s home are routinely represented in extraordinarily dehumanizing ways.  

Once again, King Kong Vs. Godzilla follows suit. The tribe of Faro Island is portrayed by actors in full-body blackface, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical employees bribe them with a transistor radio and tobacco. This patronizing bargain, in which they steal the island god in return for habit-forming poison and toys, is part of the film’s critique of exploitative capitalism; it is also, however, played for laughs. No matter how progressive the themes, a film that features dehumanizing ridicule like this is irredeemably racist. It is interesting, too, that the first major development in the Godzilla franchise’s relationship with its US audience foregrounds anti-Black racism, as though one of the safe territories on which the US and Japan could rebuild their relationship was the imperialist dehumanization of Black people.

For King Kong vs. Godzilla is historically and politically significant most of all because it was an international co-production between Japanese and American filmmakers. Where the original Godzilla is a fable of the nuclear suffering that the US inflicted upon Japan, made only two years after the conclusion of the post-war American occupation, King Kong vs. Godzilla is a symbol (and product) of the renewed Pacific alliance and the reestablishment of geopolitical cooperation between the US and Japan. Ishiro Honda returned to direct the original Japanese version for Toho, released in 1962, and John Beck helmed the adaptation of the US version for Universal Pictures, which was released the following year. This collaboration would fuel a monster movie franchise that endures today.

“This is UN reporter Eric Carter with the news”

Prior to Emmerich’s 1998 adaptation, every time a Godzilla movie appeared in Western markets it would be bowdlerized in some way. The movies were often retitled, recut, or given comically bad English dubbing; some of them, such as the original Godzilla and Godzilla 1985, were reshot, with American stars retroactively given focalizing roles in order, it was thought, to make the films more appealing to American and European audiences. Many of the recuts were extraordinarily unforgiving—the NBC screening of Godzilla vs. Megalon, for example, savagely streamlined the movie down to just 48 minutes, cutting out almost half of the movie in order to accommodate commercials and a Godzilla-suited John Belushi’s accompanying skits.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is unique in the way it is recut. A great deal of Honda’s original is brusquely shaven off and replaced, not with dramatic scenes featuring American actors, but with newscast-style footage of a reporter, Eric Carter, explaining the events of the plot directly to the audience. There is an amusing irony here: in the Japanese version, Pacific Pharmaceutical needs to use Kong for advertising because their own TV show is “dull, boring, and without imagination.” Carter’s broadcasts are almost as dry as the output of Pacific Pharmaceutical’s fictional TV network, as clumsily direct and awkwardly literal an expository device as you are ever likely to see in any film. Carter, the voice of the movie, is the antithesis of “show, don’t tell,” sometimes dictating not only the events but the way we should feel about them, too.

This clunkily oratorical exposition may be dramatically flat, but it has the virtue at least of being swift. One of the enduring problems of the Shōwa Godzilla series is the grinding slowness of some of the utterly turgid exposition, so it is in a way gratifying for an audience to be simply given the facts rather than having to yawn through interminable dialogue. And Carter’s scenes are also, sometimes, wonderfully comic. The scene in which he invites a paleontological expert into the studio to explain Godzilla’s origins and anatomy, for instance, features this expert—purportedly from New York University—using a child’s illustrated guide to dinosaurs as a visual aid.

And this formal oddness did nothing to stop the film’s popularity, as it was a hit on both sides of the Pacific. Strangely, though, given the film’s walloping success, Godzilla and Kong would never meet again until this year’s Godzilla vs. Kong, produced as part of Legendary’s MonsterVerse, which will be released almost a full sixty years after the movie it pays homage to. This seems odd, given that Toho retained the rights to Kong long enough to make King Kong Escapes in 1967, and that Toho was keen to make Godzilla face off against certain foes repeatedly—notably Mothra (four times), King Ghidorah (six times), and Mechagodzilla (five times).

The original was also uniquely difficult to acquire on home video for years, which meant that King Kong Vs. Godzilla became something of a myth, a legendary “lost” movie, particularly in my wet corner of Tory England. It was rarely if ever screened on British TV (not even in the small hours of the morning), and when a series of affordable VHS releases of Shōwa classics was released to coincide with Emmerich’s Hollywood Godzilla, King Kong Vs. Godzilla was nowhere to be seen among them, much to my adolescent disappointment. The US version was unavailable on DVD before 2006, and until the release of the 2019 Criterion Shōwa Blu-Ray box set, one of the only ways to get hold of the Japanese cut of the film was through obscure mail-order catalogs or DVD-R bootlegs.

Its iconic success, its lack of repetition, and its unavailability led to the attachment of a quasi-mythological status to this singular and mysterious film—a film that for many years of my pre-internet youth I couldn’t even confirm existed. Tantalizing half-truths and outright falsehoods circulated among fans like whispered playground rumors, further distorted in the retelling. The most enduring of these claimed that the two versions ended differently, with Kong winning in the US version but with Japanese audiences seeing Godzilla emerge victorious.

Perhaps inevitably, when I saw the film for the first time it was extraordinarily disappointing. The US cut is far less coherent than the Japanese, with characterization, comedy, and subtext stripped out; the Godzilla suit looks tired; and the Kong suit is almost unbearably goofy (despite what I said about special effects not being important, it still smarts to see them be quite so poor). But such is the unpleasable nature of fans: nothing, no matter how spectacular, could have lived up to the King Kong Vs. Godzilla in my head, nurtured by years of feverish daydreaming and speculation.

In the final analysis, what is perhaps most striking about this movie is that its legacy—the structuring principle of the Kaiju battle film—saturates every Godzilla film to come. The natives of Infant Island, home of Mothra, bear a striking resemblance to the natives of Faro Island, and the franchise as a whole is more than a little indebted to the problematic Kong mythos, not least in its representations of monster-infested lost world islands that seem to have avoided the great extinctions. This movie, and the trans-Pacific alliance of which it is so powerful a product, is in some ways the distilled essence of all the Shōwa Godzilla films: goofy, imperfect, but magically suggestive.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

The one thing nearly everyone agrees on is that AD&D 2nd Edition had some fantastic settings.  At the time these settings were new there were so many and I was in college so I never had the chance to play them.  So  I stuck with Ravenloft.  It was a perfect match for me really.  Gothic horror, D&D, what was not to love?  I was always curious about the other settings though. 

Now thanks to DriveThruRPG's Print on Demand service I can satisfy my curiosity without breaking my bank. 

First up the hardcover edition of the Spelljamer Campaign Setting. This had been the boxed set, now it is a quality color hardcover book.   I am used to a high-quality product from DriveThru on their POD but this one is above and beyond.

There are some maps and what had been inserts from the boxed sets that are now printed in the book, so I suggest getting the PDF along with the book to print these out, but the book is just fantastic. I want to try using this with my current games, Basic-era and 5th Edition,  so I hope to report on well it converts over to either of those systems.  

I also grabbed the Planescape Campaign Setting. Again this had been a boxed set and is now a single softcover book.  Again, this set had some great maps and full-color inserts that are replicated here.  This is also a good case for picking up the PDFs as well. 

Both books are really fantastic looking and I am getting a great vibe from these. I would have loved them in the 2nd Ed days. I can't wait to try them in my current games especially in 5e.  Outside of some monsters, I think it could work out well.

In preparation, I even got out my old Monstrous Compendiums to read over. 

I also grabbed some Ravenloft books to replace one I sold and one I never bought.

Domains of Dread is largely as I remembered it.  The one I had back in the day was hardcover of course.  Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is the 3.5 version of the Ravenloft adventure.  I have the other "Expedition" books and this one compares well to the ones I have already.

With the new Ravenloft book for 5e on the way and the ones already out for 5e this will give a good way to see how well they all flow.  In truth, there is little in any edition that can't be converted over. 

The PODs at DriveThruRPG have been great and are getting better.  

Mike Apichella / March 24, 2021

From Creepy Things #1, July 1975. Art and script by Tom Sutton

Today’s sophisticated communications infrastructure did not emerge fully formed as totalitarian surveillance. Its annihilation of privacy was merely the price we had to pay for an unprecedented level of reliability within an endless array of applications. The drive to eliminate the slightest material discomfort and provide instant gratification is nothing new—air conditioning and central heating technology first became widely available in the early 1900s, home refrigerators in the 1940s, TV and transistor radios in the 1950s. By the end of the 20th century, millions of people were immersed (billions still could not afford to be) in a world where technology could manage or minimize any kind of deprivation, danger, or imperfection.

Nature’s unpredictability was marginalized, and this new marginalization bore new phobias. Horror comics like Swamp Thing, Heap, and Man-Thing, films like The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), Frogs (1972), Jaws (1975), and Prophecy (1979), and novels by Guy N. Smith, John Halkin, and James Herbert presented situations that spilled out beyond the control of modern society. These narratives were set in places where technology was hard to come by, rural areas steeped in folklore, far from the reach of telephone service, big electrical grids, broadcast signals, and synthetic environmental conditioning. Charlton Publications’ acidic title Creepy Things embodied this new fear of technological deprivation.  

By 1975 Charlton had reached the peak of its creative powers. The company boasted a large, diverse roster of anthology titles that usually contained non-serialized content, and they offered artists and writers more creative freedom than any other mainstream American comic publisher. Some of their biggest sellers were horror comics; no less than eleven different mid-’70s horror titles carried the bold Charlton bull’s eye logo. Many of the Charlton’s comics adhered to an eccentric house style that favored post-impressionistic art paired with stories that were sometimes so limited in narrative content and character development that they bordered on absurdity.

Themes explored were standard genre fare: zombies, vampires, ghosts, and other undead monsters; werewolves and other lycanthropes; wizards, witches, and various ominous mystics; aliens, robots, and other sci-fi terrors; a menagerie of giant wild animals, swamp monsters, killer insects, slime creatures, and deadly plants. These latter beasts were often the subject for stories by Tom Sutton, one of the ’70s most prolific and innovative creators. Sutton’s Charlton material pushed representational art to abstract extremes. Conversely, his scripts were more nuanced than those of most other Charlton writers. In many ways, Sutton’s work epitomized the distinct tone of Creepy Things, which debuted in July 1975. In place of a fan mail page the first issue ran a bizarre manifesto that summarized the new series:

What do you think of when you read the title CREEPY THINGS? Snakes? Spiders? There are ants, rats, wriggly things in the mud when you go swimming, things you find under rocks… We neglected to mention the creepiest creep of all. Lest we forget, the deadliest species on planet Earth is Man! And, when Man gets a little twisted, spaced out, or peculiar, he can do some mighty funny things. You find sadists, psychos, killers, and all kinds of weirdos all over the place.  

This cynical outlook proved to be one of Creepy Things’ biggest narrative tropes. A powerful element of that anti-human fervor was the title’s host, Mr. Dee Munn. All Charlton horror titles featured wisecracking Crypt-Keeper-type narrators decked out in scary costumes that recalled the classic style of Universal monster films and Hammer’s sexy goth chillers. While he did have pointy elven ears and plentiful one-liners, Dee Munn didn’t look much like the other ghost hosts. He gave off the aura of a mafioso with his fine tailored pinstripe suit, neatly trimmed devil beard, and tinted cop shades. He chomped on cigars and kept a pet raven by his side at all times. Paunchy and balding with slicked back hair, he certainly looked creepy, but not in a Bela Lugosi way; more like some sketch bag who’d be lurking around at your seedier local gambling den or red light district.    

Even in stories that were literally flooded with slimy amorphic monsters, nothing was scarier than the series’ main human antagonists. These were nasty degenerates who brought cruelty and neglect to children, the disenfranchised, romantic rivals, pets, and livestock. Their tendency to prey upon the vulnerable and their lust for control stood as symbols of the cold-blooded authoritarianism that’s infected world progress since civilization’s earliest days. For the swamp mutants and supernatural globs of Creepy Things, brutal violence often functioned as a kind of vigilante justice doled out in order to keep “the creepiest creep of all” in line.    

“The Grass Is Always Greener” was the cover story of Creepy Things no. 3, one of a small but powerful selection of Charlton horror tales written by Mike Pellowski. Here we are introduced to Rud Pangley, an obnoxious alcoholic living in a swamp in America’s Deep South. After a “hard” day avoiding work and soakin’ up corn liquor, Pangley stumbles upon a cherubic community of “green folk” frolicking in a cool glade. Clad in bikinis and loin cloths made from tropical blossoms, the hairless, lime-skinned beings enjoy a utopian existence—until one of them strays unwittingly into Rud’s grimy clutches. Overcome by greed and distorted ambition, the sloppy drunk quickly puts together a crude side show that exploits his green captive, whose curious presence, up until this point, was considered to be nothing more than local myth.

It turns out the green folk can only survive on a plant-based diet and not the meat and potatoes that Rud tries to force feed his prisoner. The little green meal ticket promptly dies—starving behind bars in a makeshift cage before a noisy audience of angry hecklers. It’s a moment that emboldens a view of humanity as a nexus for all things selfish and callous. Abandoning the dead creature’s carcass, Pangley scampers back through the brush, hot on the trail of another hapless victim. Things don’t go quite according to plan, and artist Mike Vosburg renders this fateful twist with tenderness. The painful sequence makes Rud seem almost as victimized as the green folk.

Two other Creepy Things standouts come from the title’s second issue, an oozing tour de force by Nick Cuti and Tom Sutton called “Slimes, Slogs, and Glumps,” and the anti-classist Joe Gill/Rich Larson yarn “A Spell Of Misery.” The former tale centers around yet another community of surly swamp folk. The main character is a young boy fond of bringing home all kinds of swamp critters and keeping them as pets in his family’s shack. The kid’s father is a loudmouth control freak who wants none of it. With flagrant disrespect for the sanctity of life, the dad’s short fuse incurs the worst consequences for all involved.

Some of Creepy Things’ horrific locales possessed a remoteness caused by human negligence. The NYC ghetto setting of “A Spell Of Misery” is a prime example. In conditions nearly as miasmic as the swamp from the previous tale, we find the impoverished residents of a shambolic low-income housing complex struggling to survive, until slumlord Edmond Ruggles falls victim to the magic of benevolent local voodoo priestess Mama Carafino. Ruggles’ wretched indifference is matched by the horror of voodoo born monsters, gigantic versions of the dangers that plague the tenants daily (i.e., rats, roaches, fire, etc.). The landlord’s wife Ethel comes off as a shallow materialist unphased by her husband’s gross mismanagement. The elderly couple are depicted as snarling malcontents dissatisfied with themselves and each other despite their comfortable, antiseptic, and well-fortified suburban mansion far from the unfortunates whose rent checks bank roll their luxury.    

The 1970s witnessed the rise of what is known today as folk horror, and Creepy Things was one of the first comic book series to represent the genre, which works by contrasting the modern world’s scientific arrogance to the timeless forces of magic and mysticism. “The Star Of Siva,” an action packed Joe Gill/Rich Larson work from Creepy Things no. 6, presents a deadly clash where earthly strategies are no match for divine neutral chaos. Three greedy criminals (a French drug pusher, an AWOL American soldier, and a Viet Cong deserter) invade a Southeast Asian religious site with intent to steal a priceless treasure trove of artifacts. The deeper they go, the closer they get to their own destruction. Their hateful blasphemy is only surpassed by their disrespect for each other, culminating in the story’s grisly conclusion. With fierce energy, Larson’s depiction of the mercenaries’ meeting in a sleazy, smoke-infested metropolis stands in stark contrast to the jungle tranquility of the sacred enclave’s surroundings. The site’s rugged charm is preserved within a bubble of obscurity, much like the agrarian paradise Summerisle, fictional setting of 1973 folk horror touchstone The Wicker Man.      

You can’t talk about Charlton Publications without mentioning the company’s biggest superstar freelancer, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. One of Ditko’s greatest Charlton works was “Where Do They Flee?,” which ran in Creepy Things’ third issue. Yet another Joe Gill-penned folk horror parable, this one was partially inspired by real accounts of the strange beings who haunt abandoned British mines. It also boasts a complex sub-plot involving labor politics—Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. hit theaters shortly after the issue’s publication. The film follows the Brookside Strike, a violent labor uprising that occurred in a remote Appalachian town in southeast Kentucky. Tragedies connected to the strike and its impoverished proponents had been making headlines since the early ‘70s, so it’s easy to understand how these incidents could’ve impacted Gill’s script.

“Where Do They Flee?” melds archaic folklore with a politicized empathy for the desperation of miners and others suffering through the decline of the labor industry (a cultural development ingrained in many ‘70s and ‘80s historical narratives). Resembling a cross between zombies, ghosts, and mole people, the hollow-eyed, supernatural main characters secretly reside in squalid conditions hundreds of feet beneath the rubble of a decrepit Welsh mining tunnel (this locale could be a nod to another iconic artifact of the labor struggle, Idris Davies’ tragic poem “Gwalia Desert XV” aka “The Bells Of Rhymney“). The inhuman presence is just the right jolt needed in a confrontation between a close knit group of rural miners and their greedy boss, whose crimes against humanity bear close resemblance to those of the Brookside protesters’ arch enemy the Duke Power Company.  

Perhaps the most striking visual element of Creepy Things were the lavish cover paintings. Most of these were done by Sutton, with two exceptions: issue five’s cover featured a Rich Larson/Tim Boxell piece exploding within a dense zip-a-tone fade; the sixth issue brandished a moody, teal-soaked nightmare by Mike Zeck, who later became a mainstay at Marvel and popularized vigilante character The Punisher. The third issue’s Sutton cover is the major visual expression of Creepy Things’ philosophy. A distillation of “The Grass Is Always Greener,” it shows Rud Pangley overpowered by Lilliputian green folk. As they descend upon the grizzled opportunist all they can see is a threat that must be eliminated; the sanctity of human life isn’t even an afterthought. Surrounded by wilderness, impotence and terror etched upon his face, he’s paralyzed by the horror of an uncontrollable environment, pushed beyond the limits of science, immersed in a world where civilization is meaningless.

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

I am on vacation this week! So I started my day with a COVID-19 shot (Moderna version) and came home and ran some Basic D&D/OSE for my family.  We continued the War of the Witch Queens game today.  The characters entered Tanglewood Forest and stopped the Ogre attack.

My players loved Twil Topknot!  He was a huge hit with everyone especially the halfling who decided they must "cousins."  

Twill with "Kitty"

So a quick recap.  The characters are refugees from a village called Solace in my world but it was destroyed in a "natural" disaster (spoiler, it wasn't natural).  They were leading a group of other refugees to the City of East Haven.  Along the way, they have dealt with the ghosts of evil clerics, ancient witches, and more.  Today they have been asked to deal with an Ogre.  They defeated the ogre, but became snared in a Mirror of Worlds and have now been transported to Krynn.

Here they met Twil Topknot and Sarana (formerly Stevie) from the adventure, DL15 Mists of Krynn. I am also pulling in information from DL1 Dragons of Despair.  

I am just getting to the part of the adventure that didn't originally work for me; the characters needed to get the crystal to get home.  But the question comes up, why can't Sarana or Twill just go get it.  Well, sadly Twill can't sneak and sneak out as easily as he once did. Sarana, well, the towers of High Sorcerery have their eyes on her, so she is trying to lay low. 

Oh. Of course, the clerics in the group no longer have their magic.  That is going to be fun. Except for the Cleric of the Moon.  Yeah, he now has three voices in his head and he has too much magic.  That is going to be interesting.

It has been fun dropping all sorts of little Krynnisms.  I just got done re-reading the first Dragonlance trilogy so this has been really great.   This is really the first time I have ever run a game in Krynn.  It has been great so far.

Hoping to get another one in during vacation.