And here we are at the end of another #RPGaDAY for August.   What new Expeiences has this given me?

From the start, this month has been about my reflection of a Summer with the BECMI rules and Basic-era rules in general.  I spent a lot of time here thinking about what these rules do that is different than what I have been used too over the last few years (read: Modern D&D) and what I was used too back in the 80s (read: Advanced D&D).

My lens for this #RPGaDAY was these experiences. Because of that reading what others had posted gave me a very different viewpoint.  It was not 2-3 blog posts and 5-7 tweets that were all identical and everyone talking about the same thing.  This was nice.  While I was not as responsive as I would have liked to have been to others on this, reading them all was fun.

Since I also spent a lot of time talking about my BECMI/BX campaign, War of the Witch Queens, maybe I'll use that map as a simple dungeon crawl.  Maybe using ideas from my various posts here and when those don't work, well, I am sure I'll think of something. 

Hopefully, next year when this starts I'll be at Gen con again with my kids. That would be really great.

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.

It has been four years since The Undercroft No. 10 was published in August, 2016, so it was something of a surprise to see the Melsonian Arts Council publish The Undercroft No. 11 in August, 2020. Previously leading way along with the Vacant Ritual Assembly fanzine in its support for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, the new issue marks a notable change in support away from that retroclone. It comes with content suitable for any Old School Renaissance fantasy roleplaying game, it actually includes content for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. How the fanzine’s readership will react to that shift remains to be seen, but perhaps it marks the publisher’s acceptance of the influence and impact of the current version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Skipping past the editorial—since it is a secret and you are not meant to read it, The Undercroft No. 11 begins with a description of ‘The Aulk’, a strange grossly-fat slug thing which inhabits the Astral Sea and preys upon the memories of others. No one can quite agree on what the thing looks like, since it is often forgotten about or the memory of the encounter is quickly forgotten about—or actually eaten by the Auk. Written by the Chuffed Chuffer, this sounds like a rather banal beast, but if the Player Characters can actually find it and kill it, then they can harvest two things from it. First, Aulk Slim, its mucus trail said to enhance memory and illusion spells, and second, Aulk Crystals, small glass orbs—actually Aulk poo!—each of which contains a memory which can be experienced by holding it to your forehead. Such memories might be skills, spells, experiences, and more. There is plenty of gaming potential here if the Player Characters have to go on a ‘Hunting of the Aulk’ for a lost memory or clue.

Luke Le Moignan’s ‘Edicts of la Cattedral della Musica Universale’ presents seven heretical clerics. They include the Tithenites, who devote themselves to humble good  deeds, animal care, and beer-making, but revile Oozes instead of Undead and manufacture St. Tithenai’s Salt, a pinkish salt which works as Holy Water against such creatures; the Indulgencers, who believe that the spirits of the dead face a jury in the afterlife and so summon ghostly sinners to the mortal realms to work off part of their sentence; and the similar Venerators, who compel the Undead to participate in tea ceremonies and discuss their grievances, hopefully coming to terms that will redress their issues and so allow them to become restful dead! There are some interesting NPCs to be created out of these options, though for Player Characters, they present some equally as interesting roleplaying possibilities, but the descriptions do seem underdeveloped for that purpose.

For Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, the fanzine details three Dwarven archetypes. Written by Daniel Sell and Daniel Martin, these are the Circle of the Mole Rat, the Oath of the Hammerer, and the Dungeon Master. The Circle of the Mole Rat is a Dwarfen Druid Archetype which grants Blind Sight, tunnelling abilities, and even secrets answered via message drops by Mother Mole Rat. The Oath of the Hammerer is a Dwarfen Paladin Archetype which embodies Dwarven cultural justice, using hammers as a holy symbol to dispense justice, becoming intimidating and fearless, and ultimately being able to cast Branding Smite upon those that deserve justice. The Dungeon Master is a Dwarfen Ranger Archetype which hunts for monsters and creatures which the Dwarves keep as their exotic guardian beasts. Of the three, the latter again feels underwritten and perhaps the least interesting, but the other two lend themselves to inclusion in a Dwarven focused campaign.

S. Keilty’s ‘The Corpse Seller’ is weird monster NPC, a long-armed creature found only down dark alleys at night where it sells members of the undead tailored to willing buyers, reaching into its abyssal mouth to pull them forth. However, the bargain will be steep—an arm, betrayal, or worse. If a bargain is not reached, then the buyer will become one of the corpses! This is a nasty thing which might be difficult to add to campaign, but would be memorable if so added.

Lastly, ‘The Root’ by Luke Gearing—author of Fever Swamp—presents a force born of Chaos, almost primal, which constantly shifts and probes with tendrils for cracks which allow it to enter into our worlds. When it does, each tendril can take one of several different forms, from a fungal colony whose spores drive the infected to defend and become one with the colony whilst granting the secret to destroy it—if they can or are even willing, to Mind of a Willing Host which spread the Root as spoken language, written word, and meme. Could the glossolalia of a mystic be the vector for the Root’s influence? All six options are interesting and any one of them could form the basis of a campaign backdrop with some effort upon the part of the Game Master, perhaps an even larger one as the adventurers travel from plane to plane, world to world, dealing with different forms of the Root.

Physically, The Undercroft No. 11 is well presented with an excellent colour cover and an array of dark illustrations inside. It does need a closer edit in places though.


The return of The Undercroft No. 11 is certainly welcome, and despite the shift to support for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition for some of its content, it still presents oddities and weirdness just as the previous issues did. Thus Dungeon Masters can use the oddities and weirdness just as much as Referees can for the Retroclone of their choice. 

 There are all sorts of portals to be found in RPGs and D&D in particular, but one was the most important to me.

In these 16 pages, I got a glimpse of something more.  More worlds than I knew existed out there and they could be mine...all I needed was more paper-route money.

Here I first learned the differences between D&D and AD&D, though it would be a longer before I really knew.  Other games I have heard about but had not seen. Games like Dungeon! and Vampyre.   I learned of Gen Con and I wanted one of those T-Shirts.

I am a little sad we don't have these anymore, but there are far too many products these days to make it practical. 

I see Archive.org has a copy archived if you want to take a look.

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.

Monty Haul is both a different fanzine and a misnomer. Published by MonkeyHaus Press, Monty Haul suggests a type of Dungeons & Dragons game or campaign in which the Dungeon Master is unreasonably generous in awarding treasure, experience, and other rewards. Monty Haul is not that—or at least Monty Haul v1 #0 is not that. Monty Haul is also that rare beast, an old style or Old School Renaissance not devoted to a retroclone, but to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. 

Describing itself as ‘A Fifth Edition 'Zine with an Old School Vibe’, Monty Haul V1 #0 was published in April, 2020 following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of Zine Quest. It is written by Mark Finn—notable as the author of Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard—as an update of his World of Thea setting originally run and written for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. With ‘Welcome to Monty Haul: Do You Kids Want Any Snacks?’ he sets open his store, introducing himself and explaining his gaming history, why he chose Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, and what the aim of Monty Haul is—and in particular, what the purpose of Monty Haul V1 #0 is. Which is as a ‘Proof of Concept’ for the fanzine, the aim of which is rebuild his World of Thea afresh, with less inspiration taken from gaming settings and supplements past. It is a nicely personal piece which sets everything up.

Monty Haul V1 #0 gets started properly with ‘Critical Hits: An Old School Option’, designed to create special combat effects when a natural twenty or critical hit is rolled. Inspired by the viciousness of S1 Tomb of Horrors and Grimtooth’s Traps, with a roll of a six-sided die, the Dungeon Master can determine where the strike hits, for example, in the midsection and then another for the effect, such as a hit in the kidneys, which inflicts extra damage, forces a Constitution check to avoid being knocked prone, and then make all actions at Disadvantage for several hours. Critical head hits also have chance of causing confusion too. The mechanics are short and generally nasty, but not all of the effects are lethal, and once a Player Character has suffered one critical hit, he cannot suffer another (or at least until healed).

However, ‘Familiars: An Old School Inspired Alternative’ is rather disappointing because it does not deliver on its promise. The problem is that the author is himself disappointed at the options for familiars in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, and does not quite counter that. The familiar is presented as companion and conduit for for the spellcaster, and even a storage for some cantrips, but the suggested list of familiars that a Player Character might summon is just ordinary. It really would have good to have explored the ‘weird-ass’ options he found lacking. Likewise, ‘Interlude: My Balkanised World’, the author’s introduction to his campaign world is also disappointing, but because of the lack of context. It is only a very light introduction, giving descriptions of the five city states of Highgate, Rocward, Dimnae, Riverton, and Farington, but not the world itself. The only nod to that is the fact that founders of the five cities were forced to flee south when the Old World was beset by a great evil, through a mountain pass, which was subsequently blocked by a massive wall and a city before it. The lack of context is not helped by the lack of a decent map.

Fortunately, Monty Haul V1 #0 gets back on track with a slew of new character options. These start with ‘New Cleric Domains for City Campaigns’, which add more civilised options to a city state type campaign and so also contrast with more ‘savage’ options for the wilderness of a Swords & Sorcery setting. The Domains are Justice—bringing the ‘Judge, Jury, and Executioner’ to a campaign, and Civilisation—or essentially the ‘city’ Domain. These are both really flavoursome, though Justice more than Civilisation, providing numerous benefits and skill Proficiencies as well as spells. For example, the Civilisation Domain grant the Friends, Message, and Mend Cantrips and Advantage on Charisma skill rolls to influence a single person, at First Level. At Second Level, Domain grants the Ease Emotions spell, Proficiency with Insight and Perception skills at Sixth Level—double within the city walls; bring the power of the people and increase the damage of weapon strikes at Eighth Level; and at Seventeenth Level be able to walk through any door and out another. Of the two, the Justice Domain is the more obviously playable, but both are good and it would be fantastic to see the Civilisation Domain be developed city by city, to make Clerics of each city different.

‘The Divine Archaeologist: A Rogue Archetype’ is a cross between a tomb raider and a church sanctioned thief. In the Five City-States the many temples feud for worshipers and possessing the right artefact rather than leaving it in the hands of a rival and/or heretical temple is way to attract worshipers. The Archetype combines knowledge of history and forgotten lore—noted down in the Divine Archaeologist’s notebook with spells and thievery skills, and even divine intervention, for a much more nuanced Rogue character type, almost in the mode of Lara Croft or Indiana Jones, and could be a lot of fun to play. (It would also work in a setting which has a tomb raiding profession, like: Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne.)

‘New Backgrounds for your City-States’ adds exactly that. Six new Backgrounds, from high to low. They include the Exterminator of vermin—though no little yappy dog, the Pilgrim, and the Bureaucrat, followed by three types of Nobles. These are the Dilettante, the Disgraced Noble, and the Knight Errant. These open up the options for the Noble Background given in the Player’s Handbook, and are more nuanced. All six come with suggested skills and tool Proficiencies, equipment, languages, features, as well as suggested Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws. These are all very nicely done and really expand the character options available and allow the players to create interesting characters beyond their Classes.

Rounding out Monty Haul V1 #0 is a ‘Noble House Random Generator’ which again expands upon content given in an official supplement—in this case Xanathar’s Guide to Everything—and provides more detail and nuance. With a few rolls of the twenty-sided die, the Dungeon Master can create a complete noble family, from history and current trade to family tree and noble house personality traits. In general, this would work in any setting which has noble houses or families—and of course it complements the three new Noble Backgrounds in ‘New Backgrounds for your City-States’—and not just the Five City-States. 

Physically, Monty Haul V1 #0 is neat and tidy, with some decent artwork—both rights free and new. The maps are disappointing, especially given that the author is trying to present his own campaign setting. Another issue is that the table of contents does not quite match the titles of the articles as they appear, but a nice touch is that the author provides a little commentary at the start of every article.

Monty Haul V1 #0 is a curate’s egg, some good articles, some bad. However, the bad are more disappointing and the good are excellent adding more flavour through their mechanics and descriptions than in the background material. Certainly, the new Backgrounds would suit many a setting other than the Five City-States. However, there is not much in the way of a Swords & Sorcery feel to Monty Haul V1 #0, more Italianate city-states than the Hyborian Age. That is no bad thing, but it may not necessarily be what the author is aiming for.


Overall, as a Proof of Concept, Monty Haul V1 #0 is decent support for a Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition campaign, especially in the character options. It proves you can have as good a fanzine for the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons as you can for the Retroclone of your choice.

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.

Kraching is a little different. Penned by Zedeck Siew—author of Lorn Song of the Bachelor—and drawn by Munkao, it is the second title published by the A Thousand Thousand Islands imprint, a Southeast Asian-themed fantasy visual world-building project, one which aims to draw from regional folklore and history to create a fantasy world truly rooted in the region’s myths, rather than a set of rules simply reskinned with a fantasy culture. The result of the project to date is four fanzines, each slightly different, the first of which is marked with a ‘1’ and is MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom. This described the Death-Rolled Kingdom, or the Dismembered Land, which sits on the lake and was once the site of a great city said to have been drowned by a thousand monsters, located far up a lush river. It is ruled by crocodiles in lazy, benign fashion, they police the river, and their decrees outlaw the exploration of the ruins of MR-KR-GR, and they sometimes hire adventurers.

What set MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom apart from its setting is the combination of art and text. The latter describes the place, its peoples and personalities, its places, and its strangeness with a very simple economy of words. Which is paired with the utterly delightful artwork which captures the strangeness and exoticism of the setting and brings it alive. Kraching is just the same and like MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom, it is systemless, having no mechanics bar a table or two—MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom has more—meaning that Kraching could be run using any manner of roleplaying games and systems. Where MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom described a kingdom though, Kraching—marked with a ‘2’—details a village and its forest environs.

Kraching lies five days to the west on foot, the route lined with wooden posts carved with cats—snarling tigers, sulking tabbies, and sleepy tomcats, each of them watching you warily. Cats are found everywhere in Kraching, on the streets and in the houses, worn as hats, on the seat of the local ruler such that he has to perch on the edge of his seat, and of all sizes—from kittens to tigers, and carved everywhere. Even the local god, Auw, a six-legged panther with a human face has been carved as a statue which stands at the centre of the village, scratched by many cats and burned by many offerings. The villagers are famed for their skill in woodcarving, the wood they take from the surrounding forest possessed by spirits so bored their want is to be carved into masks and worn in the theatre. Thus, they will get to see the world, and many have gone on to have illustrious careers!

Both the details and the secrets of Kraching are revealed at a sedate pace. The Player Characters may encounter Neha, a Buffalo-woman who sells silks, fine tools, and pearl jewellery in return for crafts, forest goods, and the occasional adventuresome youth; priests who come to Kraching to commission idols of their gods in the forest’s holy rosewood—blasphemous acts cannot be performed in the presence of such idols; and whether a tabby or a tiger, no cat in the village is tame, all are wild and can only be distracted. This can be best done with a magical wand, ball, or chew toy, that is, a cat toy! Along the way, the relationship between the villagers and the cats they revere and honour is explained through the stories of Auw, from ‘Auw the Woodworker’ who carved cats to drive out soldiers who had come to cut the forest down and so filled it with felines of all sizes, to ‘Auw the Suitor, who would have cruelly taken a woodcarver, but she cleverly carved a tigress with which to capture his ardour and so force him to reign in his cruelty. It all builds a simple, but beautiful picture of the village and its surrounds.

Unlike MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom, there are no the tables for creating encounters and scenarios in Kraching. Instead a handful of scenario seeds are scattered across its pages, such as Neha the Buffalo-women having lost her Ari the Bookkeeper, her counting spirit, in the village or Mahi needing adventurers to escort her apprentice who has been sent to deliver an idol to a distant temple whose priesthood has suffered a schism. None of the seeds amount to more than a line or two, so a Game Master will need to do some development work, and further their number fits the sparseness of the descriptions and of the village itself. Kraching is a quiet, sleepy place and to have fulsome encounter tables might have made it feel too busy. Plus of course, it leaves plenty of room for the Game Master to add her own content.

Physically, Kraching is a slim booklet which possesses a lovely simplicity, both in terms of the words and the art. Together they evoke visions of a very different world and of a very different fantasy to which a Western audience is used, but the light text makes it all very accessible as the art entrances the reader. For the Game Master wanting to take her campaign to somewhere a little strange, somewhere warily bucolic in a far-off land, Kraching is a perfect destination.

—oOo—
As much as it would be fantastic to see MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom, Kraching, and the other two—Upper Heleng and Andjang—collected in volume of their own, they are currently available here.

DC FanDome was last weekend and there is more to come, but here is what was released for the future of DC on your screens.



Let's start on the big screen and with the one I am looking forward to the most. Wonder Woman 84!

It has Maxwell Lord, Cheetah (Barbara Ann Minerva version), and...Steve Trevor? No idea how they are going to do that, but I am betting it was Maxwell Lord's doing.  In any case, the movie looks great and I bet soundtrack is going to be awesome. 
For the next one, let me say I am cautiously optimistic. 

Look, I am a Batman fan as much as the next DC fan, but there are other characters out there and we have had several Batman movies. 
Speaking of other characters, there is one that not a lot of people know about so it will be interesting to see how it works out on screen.  A sequel/prequel to the successful Shazam movie we are introduced to Shazam's main enemy, Black Adam.



On the smaller screen, we are going to get the "Snyder Cut" of "Justice League".  I am also looking forward to this one as well. 

If you recall a few ago Warner/DC released the "Richard Donner" cut of "Superman II." Personally, I prefer the Donner cut over the Lester/Theatrical original.  Given what I know of what was going on on the set of Justice League I am also hopeful that this one will be good too.  Though I am now hearing it will be four hours long!
You are going to need HBO Max for it, but that is fine if you already have HBO.
We are also hearing more about one of the refected Justice League Dark ideas.  This one was from Joseph Kahn.  I am not sure how far along this one ever got, but there was some cool concept art.

Dan Stevens was cast as John Constantine.  But the best is a punk-looking Zatanna played by Natalie Dormer.  I miss the fishnets, but this is cool too.
There is another FanDome coming up in a couple of weeks. I bet they will cover more of the TV shows then.

Lost our Internet yesterday do to a neighborhood outage.

When it came back on finally I had day job stuff to finish.  So I am "phoning it in" today with my Ride post.  Though I am still doing the topic I wanted.

Today's post is "Why Do Witches Ride Brooms?"

Here a couple of videos to answer that question.

First up one that talks about in terms of the practice of witches and witchcraft.

Second, we have Greg Owens from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah, College of Science.

Maybe one day I'll work up an in-game reason for witches and brooms. 

Here is a bit of an episode of Charmed to help explain why the Warren Witches are depicted on brooms.  It is a little silly, but fun.

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.

The Wormskin fanzine, published by Necrotic Gnome is written for use with Labyrinth Lord and issue by issue, details an area known as Dolmenwood, a mythical wood, an ancient place of tall trees and thick soil, rich in fungi and festooned with moss and brambles and rife with dark whimsy. Wormskin No. 1 was published in December, 2015, and was followed by Wormskin No. 2 in March, 2016. Both issues introduced the setting with a set of articles rich in flavour and atmosphere, but lacking a certain focus in that the region itself, Dolmenwood, was not detailed. Fortunately, in March, 2017, Necrotic Gnome Productions released Welcome to Dolmenwood, a free introduction to the setting. Further, Wormskin No. 3 and Wormskin No. 4, published in July, 2016 and Winter 2016 respectively, improved hugely upon the first and second issues, together providing a better introduction to Dolmenwood, giving some excellent answers to some very good questions about the setting before delving into what is the biggest secret of Dolmenwood. Published in the winter of 2017, Wormskin No. 5 looked at how the region might be explored, whilst also presenting the region around ‘Hag’s Addle’. Wormskin No. 6 focused on the area around Prigwort, as well as detailing ‘The Fairy Lords of Dolmenwood’ and the ‘Unseasons’ that beset the region, whilst Wormskin No. 7, published in the autumn of 2017, added both personal names and honourifics to Dolmenwood as well detailing further hexes under the eaves of the extensive forest.

Wormskin Issue Number 8 was published in February 2018, and exposed further secrets of Dolmenwood, presented a further guide to travelling in the region, and added further monsters. It feels like a relatively short issue, just containing four, reasonably lengthy articles, but all four do add to the setting. The issue opens with ‘The Sisters of the Chalice and the Moon’, an examination of witches and the witch cults to be found in Dolmenwood. The witches of Dolmenwood worship and become companions, guardians, and wives to otherworldly wood-gods known as Gwyrigons, and are highly secretive about their beliefs and practices. Their tenets are given as well as their initiation rites, how they live, their powers and abilities, schemes and goals, rumours about them, and their relationship with the factions also in the region. So they are cast spells like Magic-Users, gain certain powers from the Wood-gods—these are detailed in Wormskin Issue Number 7, can craft potions, talismans, and charms, and so on. For the most part, these are fairly typical abilities accorded witches, and since no mechanical details are given, the Game Master could easily refer to The Craft of the Wise: The Pagan Witch Tradition for the game stats. The relationships with other factions is just as useful, such as the Elf Lords’ view that the witches’ communion with the daemon nobles of the Otherworlds as discourteous, treacherous, and disgusting, whilst the witches claim fairies to be selfish and false; that the Duchy of Brackenwold and Barony of the High Wold tend to pointedly ignore the witches—since some of their family members might actually be witches, whilst the witches see both as ephemeral and irrelevant; and the witches seeing adventurers as useful when they need a task done that they themselves cannot do. Overall, it is good to a faction like the witches covered in such detail, and for the most part they are going to remain as NPCs, so the Game Master will need to provide the mechanics and rules herself should one of her players want a witch character.

In the course of eight issues, Wormskin has described a lot of the hexes, roads, and locations in Dolmenwood and since the region is quite a wide area, the Player Characters are going to be doing a lot of travel throughout the wood. Which also means that they are going to be staying out in the forest overnight on a regular basis. This is where ‘Camping in Dolmenwood’ comes into play, which provides rules and guidelines and charts for camping wild in the woods. This covers finding a suitable campsite, setting it up—fetching firewood, building a fire, fining water, foraging, hunting, and more, activities they might undertake during the evening, setting watches, and sleep. It all looks a bit mechanical, but with the roll of a few dice—including a thirty-sided die to determine a particular campsite and its features—a Game Master and her players can determine where and how well the Player Characters are camping, and from that derive a bit of roleplaying and party interplay. How often a Game Master wants to use these rules depends how much she wants to make travel a strong feature of her campaign (for example, it is a strong feature of The One Ring: Adventures Over The Edge Of The Wild), but can also be used to reinforce the fact that Dolmenwood does not being weird and eerie when the Player Character beds down for the night.

‘Strange Waters’ lists thirty different types and forms of water, their appearance, taste, and effect if consumed to be found in Dolmenwood—whether at the end of the day when setting up a campsite. For example, a shallow, muddy pool decorated by lilies and inhabited by amphibians whose surface is a perfect mirror and which tastes perfumed, but if drunk, instils an insatiably lascivious urge to remove your clothing! With thirty options for each element, the Game Master can use this table to make some of the waters to be found in the forest weird and hint at some the magics which run through them.

Rounding out Wormskin Issue Number 8 is more ‘Monsters of the Wood’. This entry in the department has a mycological theme with the inclusion of the Brainconk, Jack-o’-Lantern, Ochre Slime-Hulk, Pook Morel, and Wronguncle. These are all predatory fungi, some even sentient, such as carnivorous Brainconk which creep down from their current treetop homes to latch onto sleeping victims and slurp out their brains, and Pook Morels, which are tiny, but which project psychic horrors upon their victims who drop their possessions. These the Pook Morels scoop up and scamper back to their lairs to hide! All five of these fungi are accompanied by superb illustrations which will be sure to highlight their creepiness when shown to the players.

Physically, Wormskin Issue Number 8 is as well presented as previous issues. It is well written and cleanly and simply laid out. The artwork is good too, a mix of colour and black and white, which captures the weird and dreamy feel of Dolmenwood.

Of course, if you have previous issues of Wormskin, then Wormskin Issue Number 8 is absolutely worth adding—a major faction, something to engage the players and their characters with, a little of the weirdness to be region’s waters—literally, and new monsters. There is a nice sense of scale to the issue too, moving from the overview of the witches and their place in Dolmenwood, then getting smaller and smaller down to the mycology.


Sadly, Wormskin Issue Number 8 is the last issue. This is not as bad as it sounds, since Necrotic Gnome is planning to create a definitive Dolmenwood supplement, one which would best showcase the setting’s promise first hinted at with Wormskin Issue Number 1. Looking back at the eight issues, the ultimate problem with them is their ‘partwork’ structure, resulting in an incoherent feel. It meant that there would be several issues before there was a real introduction to the setting and articles which asked the most basic of questions about the region. What it felt like was needed is to take all eight issues and then split their articles up and assemble in some sort of order. With any luck, the forthcoming Dolmenwood setting supplement will address these issues, for the Wormskin fanzine has never been without flavour or atmosphere, just organisation.

Features / August 28, 2020

ROBERTS: I started watching (mostly rewatching) disaster movies old and new about a week into lockdown, which I suppose makes perfect sense. The genre turns on spectacle and catharsis, but it also pacifies: no matter how bad the real world gets, it could always get worse—so be grateful that it’s not worse. But make no mistake: Irwin Allen and co. make perfectly clear that bad stuff is on the way, always, and we have to be prepared to persevere. “Shit happens” is embedded in our national lexicon. Take your lumps. Deal with it. Just do it. Be a leader, not a follower. It is all so bedrock America that I hardly care if it’s bullshit anymore—bullshit precisely because it’s allowed to be true. We live in a land where where there are only winners and losers: those who can buy their way out of catastrophes—catastrophes that are often preventable or mitigable but made inevitable by systemic bondage to profiteers, by explicit repudiation of the idea of community—and those who can’t.

It occurred to me last week, as I rewatched The Poseidon Adventure for the umpteenth time—inarguably the peak (heh) of the genre—that it is a representative piece of American mythology, as indispensable in its way as Red River or The Big Sleep or Easy Rider. “Hell, upside down,” the theatrical poster gushes. “Life is up there,” says the Luciferian Reverend Scott to resigned Belle Rosen, as if in response. “And life always matters. Very much.” It is the Dantean journey that gives the film so much gravitas, but the (dis)honorable Reverend, in his pre-catastrophe sermon, channels the Duke, not the poet:

So what resolution should we make for the new year? Resolve to let God know that you have the guts and the will to do it alone. Resolve to fight for yourselves, and for others, for those you love. And that part of God within you will be fighting with you all the way.

This ain’t the RMS Titanic, in other words. Americans don’t play show tunes as the ship goes down. No. We clamber up enormous, tasteless fake Christmas trees, traipse through fire and corpses, and swim through flooded engine rooms to get to the cast iron hull, just as the improbable rescue team (never give up, never surrender!) is set to blowtorch a three foot square passage to sunshine-y safety.

MCKENNA: I have vague memories of watching The Poseidon Adventure for the first time in its debut showing on British television over the 1979 Christmas holidays, and it felt like I was being initiated into a new understanding of the way the world worked. Back then, the UK was a very different place—stoic certainly, but a lot less given to mors tua vita mea walk-it-off lead-don’t-follow bullishness than our increasing alignment with you lot over the last few decades has made us. Plus it was—for the most part—relatively safe and stable-seeming. So the lesson I took from The Poseidon Adventure, call it the Irwin Allen Doctrine if you will, was that stability is fragile and that in any moment, reality can be turned upside down (bum-tish!). The takeaway of my child-of-’70s Britain brain was not the perhaps more logical “be brave, fight on, struggle through” preppery conclusion, but a kind of anxious resignation to disaster that, after the many disaster movies I would see over the following years, would be taken to its logical extreme in 1984 with the BBC’s nuclear war disaster movie Threads. Weird how the same stimulus can provoke such different reactions when the context is different.

Watching it now for the first time in decades, I’m struck by several things. Firstly and most superficially, Roddy McDowell’s atrocious Scottish (if it is even supposed to be Scottish) accent, and the awe-inspiring shittiness of the model work that opens the film, which looks appalling on a telly, so it’s inconceivable that on a cinema screen it didn’t provoke howls of outrage. I’m also struck by how great Pamela Sue Martin and Stella Stevens and Ernie Borgnine (as Linda and Mike Rogo) are (predictably, it’s Borgnine who pulls out the one moment of genuine pathos in the whole film), and by how much I’ve missed Shelley Winters. But mainly I’m struck by what a dick the Rev. Scott is. Sure, he gets his little gang of followers—well, some of them—up to the propeller shafts, but seemingly as much by luck as by any actual plan or talent above and beyond not giving up. How many other little groups of survivors led by some other manic Hackman convinced he knows the way are trying to do the same thing and don’t make it? The film makes it easy for itself by following the only one that does (we know it’s the only one because the rescue helicopter pisses off as soon as they’ve emerged), but the whole thing feels like we’re watching someone—the Reverend Scott—grandstand their way through their issues with their own feelings of impotence and frustrated. I suppose it’s kind of in the cards that this is the case, though, given the way Scott tells the congregation at the sermon Kelly mentions above that “God likes winners.” I mean, it’s not like I’m much of a Bible student, but God likes winners? I thought he was planning on giving the planet to the meek?

Perhaps the whole thing is implicitly seen from a winner-loving God’s-eye POV, keeping the focus on the people that God likes so much while the losers all get smashed to bits. What do you think, Mike? Does that feel like something that was echoing through these films, until Threads proposed a disaster in which surviving was actually worse than dying?

GRASSO: For me personally, 1970s disaster movies have more often been something to analyze rather than enjoy; they do speak so clearly to a certain high American imperial bloat: bigger casts, bigger spectacles, longer running times, bigger publicity campaigns, cheesier gimmicks. So I think that’s why, when re-watching the arguable Big Three for this piece—the original Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974)—I was a little shocked to remember how downright boring all three of them are. Nothing specifically against the star-studded (and undeniably talented) casts, but so many of the actors seem to be content to hit their marks and pick up a paycheck. With the exception of standouts like George Kennedy in the Airport series (who goes from salt of the earth mechanic in Airport ’70 to “largely in on the joke” full airliner captain by the time The Concorde… Airport ’79 staggers across the finish line), or the unbeatable (yet somehow still slightly disappointing!) ¿quién es más macho? duo of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in Inferno and the always, er, compelling Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. These big Hollywood names, a good number of them washed up and forgotten at the time, just look slightly on the side of mortified that their careers have brought them to this. But again, as you guys mentioned, these movies were also the biggest box office hits of their day, the star-studded, effects-laden blockbusters that ruled the cinemas and drive-ins before the coming of Star Wars. What gives?

I could trot out the usual rigmarole about these films speaking to a Nixon-era sense of American decline, of watching the technological wonders we’d built during the Cold War begin to decay and fall apart—and don’t get me wrong, that’s a really solid analysis! But I think there’s more to the ’70s disaster film than just a deeply buried sense of American masochism. Because there is that Rev. Scott-inspired sense of “we’re going to beat this thing with good old American know-how and good old American aggression” threaded throughout all these movies. Whatever else has been said ad infinitum about the supposed malaise of the 1970s, we know now, a half-century later, that most Americans literally never had it better economically than when these movies came out. And I think on some level, the writers and producers knew that. They knew that living in American society as a patriotic white American male between 1970 and 1975 was easy—possibly the easiest it had ever been, despite the dual prongs of Vietnam and Watergate—and that Americans on some level can’t abide the living being easy. The restless American needs conflict, he needs adversity, he needs a sinking ship or a burning building or a sudden earthquake to fight against to really prove we’re winners.

There is one thematic element of the early genre that is worth praising from a political perspective, though, and that’s the multi-level plots and the innocent bystander characters who get to prove themselves and their mettle during the disaster. Every B-level star or Golden Age of Hollywood re-tread gets a juicy character development scene or a subplot, and while, yes, the stars are the stars and the heroes are the heroes, in each one of these movies there are plenty of Just Plain Ordinary Folks among the square-jawed heroes. Maybe it’s not socialist realism or Brechtian dramatic deconstruction, but it’s the closest that the American blockbuster can bring itself to provide: a relatable, identifiable proxy for the ordinary schlub or harried housewife in the audience. It’s small “d” democratic in the best tradition of American literature and drama, and I unabashedly love it as a trope, whether it’s the aforementioned unexpectedly heroic Winters in Poseidon or Geneviève Bujold in Earthquake or countless other examples, ordinary doughty folks (including plenty of women!) get to save lives and be heroes. That seems like a fine and necessary moral and political lesson to come out of these things.

ROBERTS: I think these films are democratic in more ways than one. In The Towering Inferno, it’s the greedy developer who refuses to evacuate the building because he has a big deal at stake; in The Poseidon Adventure, the owner’s agent orders the Captain to push on at full speed to save money, rendering the ship unballasted; in Earthquake, architect Stewart Graff puts his firm in jeopardy by demanding a prize client pay for necessary safety measures in his new office building; in Twister, the bad guys in their shiny black vans are “in it for the money, not the science”; in Dante’s Peak, the town’s business leaders don’t want to evacuate because they’ll forfeit the windfall of the annual Pioneer Days Festival (just as the Mayor in Jaws refuses to close the beach during the summer tourism peak). Is this sounding familiar? Anyway, the list goes on. In the 2000s and beyond, climate change is often the culprit (with all the histrionics of an Aaron Sorkin script), and once again greed is at the core (heh) of the resulting cataclysm. Life  may matter “very much” to Reverend Scott, but his country (and God, apparently) routinely sacrifices it so that the rich can stay rich.

These films also display and require shared sacrifice, often on a global scale—an unthinkable suggestion in America since at least the Vietnam War (bone spurs, anyone?). The rich can’t buy their way out of a burning (The Day the Earth Caught Fire) or freezing (The Day After Tomorrow) planet, though sometimes we have a distinctly undemocratic “ark” situation (When Worlds Collide, Deep Impact, 2012—yes, I watched it!), where the elite or “chosen” few get the chance to start a newer, better world. I think that’s why Richard has a different reaction to these films: Brits had no choice but to share the devastation and deprivation of World War II, among other tragedies.

The phrase “washed up” (heh) got me thinking as well. Not just in terms of the past-prime-time actors, who give the audience a sense of stability and hope as the cinematic destruction unfolds, but in terms of the country itself, as Mike alludes to above. As Rambo and his ilk fought and won Vietnam retroactively in the ‘80s, so the disaster films of the ‘70s gave us an enemy that was worthy of us, an enemy we could bear losing to, an enemy that could not be sympathized with—and at the same time an enemy we could claim a moral victory against.

MCKENNA: That’s a thought that struck me too, Kelly—how differently these films must have played in the States to the way they did everywhere else, even somewhere as nominally similar (as in, not at the time actually that similar at all) as the UK. Obviously a lot of the same mechanisms would have been at play, but it seems to me that—apart from the emphasis on thrills and catharsis—the focus over our way at least was perhaps more on the “disaster” part than the “movie”: on the implicit warning against hubris that set the superstitious protestant wiring buried beneath the country’s modernizing surface humming.

But then, only America could have afforded to make this kind of thing as a throwaway entertainment anyway: even second-tier Irwin Allen-ery would have been beyond the coffers of our national film industry, and presumably most others too. Only the US could assemble the means necessary to create mass acts of propitious magic showing the nation’s chutzpah win out over bees or bigfoot.

It’s no coincidence that the disaster movie came of age in a period of history when popular culture in all its forms was beginning to accept that the Earth was not simply an endless source of resources for us to to burn or melt down into aftershave bottles, and that if we kept hacking away at it, it might start hacking back. That schism in belief feels like it’s seeped deep into the bedrock of the zeitgeist since then, and the disaster movies of the decades that followed the ’70s have reflected that shift away from the surface. I’ve watched 2012 too, and, like so many of the modern disaster movies I’ve seen, it’s profoundly unsatisfying. For all that the special effects and stunts of the originals were considered epic at the time, there’s a staginess to the classic disaster movies that I think is an intrinsic element of their power (which makes me wonder about the parallels between the American disaster movie and the British tradition of pantomime, where marginal celebs and not-quite-has-beens are brought out around Christmas time to camp up old tales). A truly realistic disaster movie doesn’t quite hit the mark—the staginess, perhaps like the model ship in The Poseidon Adventure, is an essential part of the package, as is the weird bus-tour melange of character actors and stars. Those TV Guide-of-yesteryear casts you point out, Mike—they’re comforting. An American extrapolation of Brian Aldiss’s “cosy catastrophe,” which, like Kelly says, amps up the nation’s psychological needs.

GRASSO: As far as more contemporary disaster movies go, documentarian Adam Curtis had a stunning bit at the center of his most recent film, HyperNormalisation, where he presents a series of scenes from ’80s and ’90s disaster movies featuring titanic explosions (replete with crowds looking up at them in stunned awe) that seemed to spookily and accurately predict the traumatic images of destruction we all remember from September 11. Alien invasions, climate change-driven tidal waves, asteroids and eruptions from the Earth’s core—all these apolitical disasters fed into a spectacular idea of what our collective societal rupture point might look like. And then, suddenly, it all became real. This sort of special effects spectacle was echoed in the city-destroying pillars of light in the post-9/11 superhero film. Of course, with the 2000s superhero film, the “good guys” now have their own superhumans, wealthy tycoons, or secretive military organizations sporting a team of emotionally-stunted misfit recruits to fight against the city-destroying bad guys. The ordinary schlub from the 1970s is now nothing more than a bystander with no agency and certainly no impact.

The 1970s disaster flicks are necessarily smaller-scale, in both spectacle and stakes. I think back to how I first saw many of these films produced in the decade of my birth. Most of the time, it was either a lazy weekend afternoon movie on UHF television or a similar filler on cable superstations. Those are also the venues where I saw the more laughable disaster flicks, ones where the casts are closer to C-list than B-list. Two of the lesser-known ’70s disaster movies that are near and dear to my heart—made-for-TV Airport ripoff SST: Death Flight from 1977 and the Canadian City on Fire from 1979—featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s pre-cable season on Minneapolis UHF station KTMA-23 and were standard parts of many UHF station’s syndicated film packages. As the ’70s went on, the disaster movie held on by its fingernails, reusing the same tired tropes and plot beats until 1980 came along and America decided it was time to laugh at all those tired tropes in the classic comedy Airplane! (whose plot points and even lines of dialogue were lifted, sometimes verbatim, from Arthur Hailey’s 1957 screenplay Zero Hour!). I think about David Zucker’s subsequent transformation into conservative “satirist” and a few elements of the original Airplane! that stick in my mind, like the titular airliner’s destruction of a Chicago (!!!) radio station “where disco lives forever,” and wonder if Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker’s repudiation of the ’70s disaster film was a harbinger of Reaganite reaction. But then again, I probably think that about most cultural events from 1980.

Most of all, I miss that very cosy catastrophe nature of these films, and Richard, you’re spot on: I think the ’70s disaster film is the American version of those very British Cold War apocalypses. When I see people on screen I recognize from classic black-and-white movies or from then-contemporary sitcoms and game shows, I feel on some basic level like everything is going to be all right. As the disaster film evolved in the ’90s and beyond, my comfort as a viewer was not a concern: all that mattered was overwhelming the viewer’s senses with physical destruction and dislocation, or having spandexed übermenschen militaristically fight against the destruction (which often had the effect of fomenting yet more mega-destruction). Glaringly mortal Shelley Winters isn’t coming to swim through the chaos and save us anymore. Make room for Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne.

ROBERTS: Here are two more idiomatic entries for you: God helps those who help themselves, and every man for himself. Both come deep from the well of Western culture (Greek tragedy and Chaucer, respectively), and both were codified in American Puritanism. For the Puritans, you never knew if you were saved or not until you woke up in Heaven (or “Hell, upside down”), so you simply exerted “a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned.” And of course they were obsessed with the Book of Revelation, the foretelling of the disaster to end all disasters. Basically, they were not a lot of fun.

Do you remember the Pastor in 1953’s The War of the Worlds, an early sci-fi entry that’s also a proto-disaster film? He thinks he can make peace with the invading Martians, and slowly walks up to their hovering war machines, clutching his Bible and quoting the Lord’s Prayer. He’s immediately blasted into ashes. And yet, at the very end of the film, the protagonists are reunited in a church filled with silently praying refugees, and as the Martians begin to attack the Lord’s House, they start to drop dead. You just never know which God you’re going to get.

In one of my favorite scenes in The Poseidon Adventure, Scott and his flock are shocked to come across another, even more bedraggled, group of survivors. They file past in a line, heads down, resigned, plodding. The leader, a doctor, explains that they’re headed towards the bow, which Scott explains is underwater. They are the damned, just like the survivors who refused to climb up the giant Christmas tree. And Scott represents both faith and reason. In the end, God pisses on him too—a punishment for the prideful, mortal perseverance that got him to the finish line.

As you’ve both said, these narratives have become a glut and blur of superheroes and CGI. I guess they were never very much more. Disasters befall us in disaster movies because we’re fallen, because we fuck everything up and yet still have the nerve to believe we’re exceptional, “elect.” And they’re supposed to remind us that we’re part of a human community after all, something that real disasters do. Or did, I should say. That trust is gone. The appeal to reason is gone. God is a gun. It’s the war of each against each. We’re the disaster now.

This is about the time of year that I close out Summer projects and inventory my Fall ones to see where I am at.  

But this summer was a strange one really.  The whole Covid-19 thing changed a LOT of plans, one in particular was available free time to get other projects done. The day job was just too involved.

So I am still closing out my Summer though and looking ahead to Fall and beyond plans.  Here is what is going on for me and The Other Side.

Right now I am archiving old projects, both personal and work, I like to have a nice cleaned out work space on my computers.  This also gives me the opportunity to see what I have been working on and what still needs to be done. 

I still have a little bit more I want to do for BECMI month Summer, including a deep dive into the Shadow Elves like I mentioned on Day 9.  That though is in a couple more weeks. 

The really GREAT thing about this #RPGaDAY2020 posting is it has me thinking about all my stacks of research material and upcoming projects.

War of the Witch Queens Campaign

The War of the Witch Queens has been on my mind a lot since I want to run it under the B/X or BECMI rules.  I just have not figured out all the points yet.  I pointed out on Day 20 that Kelek is likely to be my bad guy.  And I think that still works.  In fact if the campaign only goes to level 14 (B/X, OSE) then that will be my guy.  BUT What if Kelek sets thing into motion he didn't predict and it quickly got out of hand?  The Witches, held in check by the Witch Queens are now doing some real damage?  What then? Well. In that case we continue on to level 36!  Who knows, I might even start it with the classic "You meet in an Inn".

Super Dungeon Explorer Adventure Team Go, Go, GO!

This is a bit of a goof, but it has gotten a lot of attention.  I secured an artist this week for the first release of this.  It will be for 5e and likely 180° away from anything Old-School.

Basic Bestiary and High Witchcraft

The first draft of Basic Bestiary is done, working on the beta draft now. I also put together my spreadsheet to track art development. Sadly I have not actually secured any new artists for this one.  So that might be a delay. 

The High Witchcraft book is no where near ready.  I was going over my notes and I am not even sure I have anything that can be considered a draft at this point. Just about a dozen or so files of notes that need to be collated, edited and then made into something. Additionally I have files of materials that did not make the cut for some of the other books; usually due to space or because the idea was not as complete as I would have liked.  If this is really going to be my "last witch book" then it behooves me to either find a home for those orphans here or on my blog.  One such orphan was the Goblin Forest of Haven.

I really want the High Witchcraft book to be really special. I want it to feature some of the ideas I have been playing with for years and to be my Coda for this series. 

I have a couple of other projects on the burners, but nothing I can share just yet.

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 continues the run of themed issues.

As the title suggests, Crawl! Issue V: Monsters is all about monsters in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. To that end, its seven articles do several things, such as adding Class-like features to monsters, adding a monstrous Player Class in the form of the ORC, providing a cheat sheet for creating monsters quickly—and more. Published in February 2013, Crawl! Issue V: Monsters is no mere menagerie of new creatures to kill and loot—though it does include a few new creatures—but in general a collection of ideas to help the Judge handle her monsters, from creation to making them interesting.

Crawl! Issue V: Monsters opens with Reverend Dak’s ‘Monsters with Class’. This provides a means giving monsters one of the four core classes in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game—the Cleric, the Thief, the Warrior, and the Wizard. It does this by applying a simple template. So to make a Goblin Thief, the Judge would decrease its Hit Dice by one, increase its Reflex and Fortitude Saves by one, and give it the Sneak Attack, Trickster, and Trapper abilities equal to a member of the Thief Class four Levels higher than the Goblin’s Hit Dice. It is a quick and dirty method, but it adds quick abilities to the monsters, and it does one more thing—it hints at the possibility of playing monsters as Player Characters! Now it does not follow through on that, but the possibility is there. However, Shane Clements’ ‘Orc: A monstrous class’ does follow through in detailing the Orc as a playable character type, adhering to the ‘Race as Class’ model of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. There is definitely an Old School Renaissance feel to the design in making the Orc nasty, brutal, and (probably) short. Orcs are Chaotically-aligned fighters, preferring to use two-handed weapons and the power necessary to wield them. The Orc can also enter into Rages to gain bonuses to his attack bonus and damage, as well as movement, Hit Points, Fortitude Saving Throws, and more. For the most part, this looks very much like the Barbarian of the traditional Dungeons & Dragons, but again, point to the possibility of monsters as a Player Characters. (As an aside, it would be fun to do that with Goblins for something like In The Shadow of Mount Rotten.)

‘Quick Monster Stats’ by Jeremy Deram provides a ‘cheat sheet’ for creating and adjusting monsters very quickly. It is similar to the earlier ‘Monsters with Class’ in allowing similar options, but broadens the types of monsters it covers by type, from Aberration, Animal, and Beast to Shapechanger, Undead, and Vermin. It is not immediately obvious quite how it works, so it could have done with an example or two, but once adapted to, it should help the Judge fairly easily. Sean Ellis’ ‘Consider the Greenskins’ attempts to tackle the hoary old issue of how to make your monsters unique—or least less generic. It gives three different takes up three types of ‘Greenskin’, the Goblin, the Hobgoblin, and the Ork. So for the Goblin suggests that they are patron-bound to demons and often to come to work as go-betweens between demons and the mortals who truck with each other; the Hobgoblin is not as warlike as portrayed elsewhere and prefers to serve others, but his thieving tendencies often get him into trouble; and the Ork serves as warriors. Unfortunately, for all of the efforts upon the part of the author to make these creatures (more) unique, there is very little here that does this—especially for the Ork. There is potential here, but ‘Consider the Greenskins’ is underwritten and underdeveloped and just not that easy to bring to a game.

Jeff Rients—author of Broodmother Skyfortress—provides ‘Quickie Wandering Monster Tables’, something that the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game actually lacks. These run from Level 1 to Level 5 and enable the Judge to use some of the roleplaying game’s weirder shaped dice. In general, the Judge will need to generate some Primeval Slimes and Type I Demons if using these tables. Rounding out Crawl! Issue V: Monsters is an actual quartet of monsters. These include Brad Littman’s ‘Fung-Eye’ and ‘Stonecrawler’. The ‘Fung-Eye’ is a carnivorous fungus which has stalks ending in eyes that blink in a disturbing fashion and can daze those who walk into areas they carpet—dazed victims become food, whilst the ‘Stonecrawler’ is a Primordial creature resembling a massive, if flat boulder, which it turns out, is incredibly difficult to nudge into action. It might be worth it though, for the Stonecrawler’s Black Adamantine heart can be ground up for amazing benefits if consumed, such as a permanent +5 bonus to Armour Class and Fortitude saving throws. Lastly, Colin Chapman’s ‘Hounds from Hell: A Pair of Monstrous Canines’ offers two nasty types of dog. The Blood Hound is a vampiric dog capable of gliding short distances on the membranes between its front and rear legs, and from its high perch ambush and feed upon its victims with its tubular, bloodsucking tongue. The Gloom Hound is a silent, hairless, white dog which lives and hunts in packs deep underground, often able to spot the invisible through its sense of small and its echolocation ability. The Blood Hound has never been domesticated, but supposedly, the Gloom Hound can be. Nicely, both of these alternate dogs come with a scenario seed for the Judge to develop for her game.

Physically, Crawl! Issue V: Monsters is neat and tidy. The few pieces of artwork are decent, and the writing only needs a slight edit here or there. As an issue though, Crawl! Issue V: Monsters feels more utilitarian rather than inspirational. That in part is down to the inclusion of not one, but two means of tweaking monsters which cover some of the same ground, and the fact that the one article which discusses new interpretations of standard humanoid races, ‘Consider the Greenskins’, is underwhelming. However, both ‘Monsters with Class’ and ‘Quick Monster Stats’ are useful. ‘Orc: A monstrous class’ is perhaps a bit more interesting, and it would have been nice to have seen the inclusion of other Orcish or Goblinoid Classes to really push the monstrous theme in a different direction. Overall, Crawl! Issue V: Monsters is not a great issue of the fanzine, but neither is it a bad one either. Rather it is just lacking a certain something.

Today is my younger Brother's Birthday.  I also always associate this day as the real first day of the Fall Term.  I have been in academia for so long (all my life really) that my calendar still pivots on the Fall term.

So my youngest son started his senior year last week. My older son can't go back to culinary school just yet. My Fall term started on Monday.   Time to clear up old summer projects and move into new Fall ones.

And for this, I am asking for a Favor.

I want to get a few more of my books out into the hands of reviewers.  

So if you are interested in reviewing one of my witch books or even (or especially) Night Shift, drop me a note. You can post below, but send me an email so you can include all your contact details and where you plan on leaving your review.

Thanks! 

Again a couple ways to go.  

I could comment on these strange days, but I have other social media outlets for that.

I am going to comment on the #RPGaDAY2020 list itself in that these are a lot of strange words.  

Ok, I get it, Dave has been doing this a long time and maybe he is running out of words to use. but knowing and the work he has done in the past I highly doubt he is lacking in ideas. So I'll just put this here as my commentary and that's it.

Ok. Strange. Let's get to the meat of this.

Many of my contemporaries will point to Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, Moorcock, and Lovecraft as their main sources of inspiration to D&D.  While I share the Tolkien, Moorcock, and Lovecraft influences, I also add Clark Ashton Smith.

But those were not my only sources.

Dr. Strange and Tomb of Dracula

The 1970s were a strange time to be sure.  The 70s Occult Revival fueled my tastes in games in ways I never knew at the time and only saw in retrospect.  Case in point. Dr. Strange comics and Tomb of Dracula.  Both were favorites of mine but when Strange, along with Blade, would battle Dracula? Yeah, THAT was an adventure.  I wanted my games to have these epic world-changing battles that start small but then go on out to the cosmic scale.  Strange didn't just defeat Dracula. He destroyed all vampires.

I was already a huge horror fan at this point and Hammer Horror in particular. So these comics sent me searching more and more strange ideas for my games. I think by 1982 I had read every book of occultism in my local public library.  Creating a witch class was an inevitable conclusion at that point. 

When the Ravenloft module was released it found a no more welcome home than mine.

I have mentioned this in greater detail here.

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts

My copy
My parents were voracious readers. Books filled every corner of my home growing up and every room had at least one bookshelf, some like the living room had three. 

They, like many people of their generation, had a lot of Reader's Digest books. One, in particular, was Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.

This book should not by any stretch of the imagination be considered good literature or even good research. It is however good fun and a fun read. 

While the book is divided up into roughly chronological sections including one on the future, it was the past and the monsters of myth that always grabbed my attention.  Though flipping through it now that section on the end of the world would be fun to use.

For my birthday about 10 years ago my family found a copy and gave it to me.  Complete with original dust jacket (I am book snob and prefer my dust covers intact).

I have been asked in the past to assemble my own "Appendix N".  Maybe I'll do that one day.

Noah Berlatsky / August 25, 2020

Tom Brokaw popularized the term “The Greatest Generation” in 1998 to describe the Americans—and especially the American men—who survived the Depression and fought against Nazism in World War II. Brokaw saw this cohort in valedictory, heroic terms.

They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.

They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible…

In line with this hagiographic blueprint, discussions of World War II veterans are mostly nostalgic and congratulatory. They saved the world for us. Of course, we all know they weren’t perfect (insert obligatory nod here to Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps). But we nevertheless owe them a debt of gratitude for their service and their sacrifice.

But did people at the time see the Greatest Generation as the greatest? Ira Levin’s first novel, 1953’s A Kiss Before Dying, suggests the answer is “not so much.” Levin, who was born in 1929, just too late to participate in World War II himself, presents the men who fought against Hitler much as later writers would present the men who fought in Vietnam. Rather than saviors preserving the nation, the “greatest generation” for Levin is subversive, unstable, and a danger to order and social verities. That characterization of the young gives the book a queasy, disorienting relevance, as if Levin confusedly thought he was writing twenty years later—or forty. Or seventy.

The novel’s main character is Bud Corliss, the good-looking, working-class son of an unsuccessful father and an over-indulgent mother. Corliss is drafted, fights in the Pacific in World War II, and is honorably discharged in 1947. He goes to college, determined to make his fortune by marrying a wealthy woman, and starts dating Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of industrialist Leo Kingship. When she becomes pregnant, however, he realizes that her father will disown her for immorality. He kills her by pushing her from the roof of the municipal building where he has lured her, ostensibly to be married. He successfully makes her death look like a suicide, and there is no police investigation.

Corliss then sets his sights on Dorothy’s older sister Ellen. Using information he obtained about her from Dorothy, he woos her and becomes her fiancé also. She becomes suspicious of the cause of Dorothy’s death, however, and when her investigation threatens to expose him, he kills her too. He turns to the third Kingship daughter, Marion, and she falls in love with him too. However, Gordon Grant, a DJ who met Ellen while she was investigating Corliss, uncovers his plotting and warns Leo and Marion. They confront Corliss in Leo’s factory, where they semi-accidentally force him to fall into a vat of molten copper.

Corliss is a veteran, but he is not portrayed as a paragon. On the contrary, he’s lazy and vain, and these qualities are highlighted, or exacerbated, by the G.I. Bill. He drifts from acting school to Stoddard University, “which was supposed to be something of a country club for the children of the Midwestern wealthy,” his tuition guaranteed by the government.

The war, and social programs for veterans, allow the lower classes to mingle with their betters, resulting in boastful ambition and sociopathic violence. Corliss is evil in part because of his burning sense of entitlement beyond his station, an ambition nourished by the social dislocations of war and welfare. While he’s fighting abroad, his father conveniently dies in an auto accident, symbolizing the son’s emancipation from his past class status and the old hierarchies. Society and family alike are shattered and upended, freeing him to go down “the road to the success he was certain awaited him.”

The novel’s anxieties about Corliss’s class mobility are tangled up with concerns about gendered disorder. He pushes Dorothy to get an abortion (a plot point notably excised as too scandalous in the 1956 film adaptation), underlining the younger generation’s disdain for traditional family values. More, Bud himself is feminized—A Kiss Before Dying is a noir, and Corliss is cast in the seductive femme fatale role. He is fussy and meticulous about his appearance, and determined to advance through sexual wiles rather than hard work.

At Stoddard, as Bud starts dating Dorothy, he orders Kingship industrial pamphlets (“Technical Information on Kingship Copper”) and reads them with devoted intensity, “a musing smile on his lips, like a woman with a love letter.” When he romances Dorothy, and Ellen, and Marion in turn, he is really courting Leo Kingship, the patriarch. Leo’s daughters are merely convenient, interchangeable erotic pathways for Bud’s queer, singular passion. This is Eve Sedgwick’s “male homosocial desire,” in which men’s lust for other men and men’s lust for other men’s wealth and status are intertwined, displaced, and inseparable. Bud has one of his few honest, visceral emotional experiences towards the novel’s end, when he is being given a tour of the copper plant. He sees it as a “heart of American industry, drawing in bad blood, pumping out good! Standing so close to it, about to enter it, it was impossible not to share the surging of its power.” He is at once ravished and ravisher, entering into and filled with intoxicating patriarchal oomph.

Corliss also feels that pulse of eroticized dominance after each of his kills—and especially after his first murder, which takes place during the war. Corliss gets separated from his unit and stumbles upon a lone Japanese soldier, who tries to surrender to him. The enemy urinates in his pants in fear, and then Corliss shoots him, with a sensual deliberation.

Quite slowly, he squeezed the trigger. He did not move with the recoil. Insensate to the kick of the butt in his shoulder, he watched attentively as a black-red hole blossomed and swelled in the chest of the Jap. The little man slid clawing to the jungle floor. Bird screams were like a handful of colored cards thrown into the air.

After looking at the slain enemy for a minute or so, he turned and walked away. His step was as easy and certain as when he had crossed the stage of the auditorium after accepting his diploma.

The phallic gun, the yonic wound, and the orgasmic cries of the birds give way to a post-coital satisfaction more thorough than any pleasure Bud experiences in the arms of the Kingship daughters.

War awakens something in Corliss; he learns the pleasure of violence, which he carries back with him to unsuspecting and vulnerable civilians in the US. The dynamic is similar to David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood, in which veteran John Rambo unleashes a one-man Vietnam war on a sleepy American town. Rambo’s violence is notably racialized. Part of what happened to him in Vietnam is that he became infected with Southeast Asian methods and Southeast Asian anti-Americanism; fighting the non-white enemy turned him into the non-white enemy. Corliss, too, becomes what he fought. In the moment before he is forced into the copper vat, he soils his pants, and he remembers the soldier he killed.

The front of his pants was dark with a spreading stain that ran in a series of island blotches down his right trouser leg. Oh God! The Jap…the Jap he had killed—that wretched, trembling, chattering, pants-wetting caricature of a man—was that him? Was that himself?

Corliss’s identity and that of the Japanese man are confused as victims, and therefore also as aggressors. The vision of the Japanese as pitiful cowards substitutes for, but does not erase, the more prevalent image of the Japanese as implacable monstrous “fascist maniacs,” to use Brokaw’s term. Like Rambo, Bud as a soldier is stained with foreign violence. His assault on the status quo recapitulates the assault of a foreign enemy, and his death recapitulates that enemy’s defeat.

Levin, then, presents Corliss as an amalgamated threat, vaguely associated with a range of disparaged identities—young, working class, feminized, queer, non-white, non-American, veteran. This agglomeration of marginalized threats must be squashed by a perhaps overly strict but still essentially legitimate white, patriarchal order.

This familiar conflict is usually seen in pop culture through a generational lens. Levin’s portrayal of Bud foreshadows invidious stereotypes of lazy, feminized, racialized hippies and lazy, feminized, racialized millennials. But if even the youth of the Greatest Generation were smeared in this way, maybe the problem is not the kids themselves, but the conventional, persistently invidious stereotypes of rebellious youth. Every generation, even the greatest, is viewed as a potential betrayer, ready to overthrow the white male capitalist order. And so every generation, even the greatest, must be dumped into that copper vat, melted into the same mold, its old form erased and forgotten so the next generation’s demands can again be portrayed as novel, without history or legitimacy. The greatest generation is always the last generation. The young are supposed to kiss them before dying.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Archimedes, the polymath of classical antiquity, is quoted with "Give me a lever and firm place to stand and I will move the world."

A lever is one of the six simple machines described by Renaissance writers. The lever is usually the first, though I think the inclined plane or ramp may have historically been the first.  

How does this apply to my games? Well...it does in a couple of ways, but the underlying theme is "keep it simple."

Design

Like a lot of people, I have been working from home since March.  It has worked out well for me since I can work anywhere I have a solid internet connection.  My wife has been home as well and I will admit I have enjoyed being home with her and my kids quite a bit.  I often get to listen in on her meetings when I go upstairs (my office is in my basement next to the game room) to get coffee. She has been talking about Optimization Levers all week.  In her case it has to do with software development.  But it is something I think about a lot in my day job and in my own RPG design work.

One of the reasons I feel I will never fully be part of the Old-School movement (whatever the stripe) is that I prefer simple solutions over complicated ones.  Don't give me 10 different ways of doing something in a game when one will suffice. I don't need tables when a simple algorithm and a number will work just as well or even better.

This is one of the reasons I feel that modern D&D is superior, design-wise, to older D&D.  I don't need pages of attack matrices for different classes and monsters when 3.x BAB and AC as DC works so much better.  I don't need percentile dive for thieves skills and d6s for ranger skills when both can be done with a d20.

The more you can simplify the rules the more then fade into the background and people can just play.

This is the central design philosophy behind Cinematic Unisystem. Everything is d10 based. Successes are based on any adjusted roll over a 9.  Simple. 

But simple mechanics do mean the game as been "simplified" or "dumbed down." It means the esoterica has been removed.  For D&D and Unisystem the lever is the d20 and d10 respectively.

I see a lot of people online complaining that such and such game is "dumbed down" or "made simple," often accompanied by a confession of never actually have played the game in question. 

Don't confuse simple with simplistic. 

Tools of Design

Likewise, I like to keep my process of design simple.  I feel it puts me into the right headspace for design.  So my levers here are the basic sort.  Paper and pencil.

Don't get me wrong. I am a technophile.  My wife and I love to be on the cutting edge of technology. I can even remember a time in the early 90s where I was looking for 50Ω terminators for the in house network we had built when such things were not only not common, but there was no good place to buy all the parts we needed for the multiple types of computers we had at the time.  

I will still run stats to determine spell levels and figure out which levels are needed.  While I can, and do, run those on my computer, I taught stats for long enough to also do the calculations with a pencil. 

Research still involves me, some books, and a folded up sheet of paper that serves as a bookmark and a place to keep notes. 

Coffee and pencils. Still my most reliable tools.

I mean yes. I will still transcribe those notes onto my PC/Laptop/Phone with some more details. but it has worked well for me for years.

So my advice is to be like Archimedes.  No, I don't mean run through the streets of Syracuse naked yelling "Eureka!" But rather use the simple tools and find a good place to stand.

Wizards of the Coast just announced their next book for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and I could not more excited.

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is set for release on November 17, 2020.  I already pre-ordered the standard and alternate cover from my FLGS so I should be getting it on Nov. 7.

What is this book about?  Well, that is Tasha, aka Natasha the Dark, aka Iggwilv the Witch Queen on the cover.  Honestly, that is all I need to know.

But...I can see why others might want to know more. 

It is going to be set up similar to Xanathar's Guide to Everything with new rules.  What do I know is in it so far?

• New subclasses for every class.
• The Artificer class.
• Some psionic classes such as the Aberrant Mind.
• A new lineage system that adds on to and supplants the D&D racial system. Rather looking forward to that.
• Group Patrons and sidekicks. Add a little more organization to your adventuring group. 
• New spells, artifacts and magical tattoos.  That chicken foot tattoo on Tasha's face is a huge clue as to what you are likely to get. (more on that later)
• Puzzles and more puzzles!

So yeah a lot to offer.  And a lot of it looks like it would translate well into other versions of D&D; which was one of the early design goals of D&D5e/Next.  
I am sure I will find out more, but that chicken foot tattoo on Tasha/Iggwilv gives me a LOT of ideas.  It also might help me figure out some details of my own Pact of Baba Yaga that I talked about a bit ago.  Though now I might call it "The Mark of Baba Yaga" and it is how the Daughters of Baba Yaga can recognize each other.  I can expand on the magical tattoos I presented in The Craft of the Wise: The Pagan Witch Tradition. 
The art for this also looks fantastic as to be expected.

There is nothing I don't love about that picture.   The color palette, moon, and satyr remind me of the cover of Dragon #114.And that is Graz'zt on the Alternate limited edition cover too.

Wizards is hosting a D&D Celebration on September 18-20 and will be revealing more.  I am going to try to make it.

Too bad it won't be out for Halloween!

Of course let's not forget the art Jacob Blackmon created for me of the Witch Queens, Larina, Feiya, and Iggwilv!

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was a Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.


—oOo—

Name: Prison for a Thousand Young

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Jessica Gunn & Skippy

Setting: A Correctional Centre in 1950s USA

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Eleven page, 5.15 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes escaping one prison means ending up in another.
Plot Hook:  Escape is your only hope of getting out of here.
Plot Support: Five handouts/maps/Mythos tomes, five NPCs, and four pregenerated inmates (investigators).
Production Values: Tidy layout, needs another edit, but double-page spreads.

Pros
# Focused one-shot
# Different time, different setting
# Good mix of stealth, action, investigation, and roleplaying
# Potential convention scenario
# Horrible flashback scenario?
# Easily transported to other times and places

Cons
# Linear plot
# Double-page spreads
# Difficult to work into a campaign

Conclusion
# Good mix of stealth, action, investigation, and roleplaying
# Different time, different setting
# The Shawshank Redemption meets Shub-Niggurath

I have always believed that humor is essential in most games.Yes, it can be a serious game, but humor; sometimes even gallows humor, is needed.


Like anything, it can be overdone.  In high school during our AD&D games, we had to put a moratorium on stupid puns in our games.  It got so bad that it led to our DM creating the "Wandering Damage table" or just damage your character took from the universe reacting to your pun.  It, in of itself, was a humorous solution to the problem.
For Ghosts of Albion, I wrote a section on horror role-playing. I got into some detail that is appropriate for that game but I also included a section called "See A Little Light" (yes, I am a Bob Mould fan). The point was that constant horrors will wear your characters, and players, down. That every so often you need to lighten the mood.  Even the Ghosts of Albion web-episodes and books had a good mix of humor to them. I mean you can't have the ghost of Lord Byron and not have fun with that.
The topic of RPGs and humor is vast really. So there is no way I am going even cover 1% of it in a blog post.  But I figure I will cover one other thing.
I don't want to make it look like that all my games are Toon or Paranoia, I do like a serious game.  BUT just like too much humor is a bad thing, taking yourself too seriously is also bad.
A while back I was at a game at Gen Con. This was before my family started going with me and I was in a Mutants and Masterminds game. The GM was a real dick. There were a couple of younger kids in the game and like kids do, they joked and had fun, and the GM was just a real bastard to them.  Yes you can have a serious game, but don't be an asshole about it.  It was this dudes game, so I was not going to tell him how to run it, so I did the "dad thing" I just inserted myself between the kids and the GM.  I turned the three of us into this little mini-team of the eight sitting there so he didn't have to talk to them directly.  I don't think he knew how to deal with kids really.
So be like Bob Mould and see a little light.

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was a Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: Leptis Magna

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Marco Carrer

Setting: 1930s Libya for Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Eleven page, 606.96 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Imperial ambitions don’t always end in glory, sometimes they end in gore.
Plot Hook:  Exemplary service got you noticed, a special mission could get you sent home—a fine reward. 
Plot Support: Three NPCs, multiple Mythos creatures, and four pregenerated Italian Regio
Esercito soldier player characters.
Production Values: Tidy layout, scrappy art, and needs localising.

Pros
# Different time, different place
# Scenario for Pulp Cthulhu

Cons
# Linear
# Just following orders
# No investigator agency
# How are you with the fascist regime? 
# Pulp Cthulhu or Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition—does it matter?

Conclusion
# Just following orders
# More novel than scenario

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was a Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: Hidden Within

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Avery M. Viers

Setting: Jazz Age Toledo

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirteen page, 820.88 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Blue murder in the doghouse
Plot Hook:  When family members suddenly turn giggly, obese, and standoffish, something strange must be going on.
Plot Support: Four NPCs, two Mythos creatures, one Mythos tome, and one handout.
Production Values: Tidy layout, needs another edit, and functional map.

Pros
# Bloody body horror
# Charnel house horror
# Decent mix of investigation and combat
# ‘Aliens’ in Toledo?

Cons
# Bloody body horror
# Potentially too combat focused?

Conclusion
# Decent mix of investigation and combat
# Charnel house horror-oneshot