BECMI Month continues here at The Other Side with an early Father's Day gift for me.

The Principalities of Glantri, Print on Demand version.


I reviewed the PDF and my original print version some time ago, so if you want to check that out it is here.

The PoD is fantastic really, and great to have since this is the one Gazetteer that sees the most use out of all my Basic-era books.


My original signed by Bruce Heard.




The original Gaz 3 cost $8.95 back in 1987.  This one set me back $7.66. 


Yeah, no shipping since it is part of a multi-shipment.  Part two should be here next week. I hope so, I have a lot to say about that one.

The maps are attached to the spine, so not as useful as they could be, but getting the PDF is part of the PoD, so I can always print them out if I don't want to use my originals. 

For the price being able to put up my original and have one I can use daily if needed is a steal really.

Each PoD has been getting better and better. This one seems to be best so far.

As its title suggests Bayt al Azif – A magazine for Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying games is a magazine dedicated to roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Published by Bayt al Azif it includes content for both Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition from Chaosium, Inc. and Trail of Cthulhu from Pelgrane Press, which means that its content can also be used with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and The Fall of DELTA GREEN. Published in September, 2019, Bayt al Azif Issue 02 does not include any content for use with the latter two roleplaying games, but instead includes three scenarios—stated for both Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and Trail of Cthulhu, discussion of how to run a specific modern campaign, a review of a recently-rereleased classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu, interviews, an overview of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying in 2018, and more. All of which, once again, comes packaged in a solid, full colour, Print On Demand book.
Bayt al Azif Issue 02 opens with editorial, ‘Houses of the Unholy’, which really takes stock of the progress of the magazine from the first issue to this one. So it is somewhat reflective in nature before it sets out what the Bayt al Azif Issue 02 is all about, and so is also focused on the job at hand. Its reflective nature is coupled with ‘Sacrifices’ and then ‘Cthulhu in 2018: A Review’. ‘Sacrifices’ is the letters page, which covers the response to Bayt al Azif Issue 01 and so lays the background for the potential community which come to be built around the magazine. ‘Cthulhu in 2018: A Review’ is by Dean Englehardt of CthulhuReborn.com—publisher of Convicts & Cthulhu: Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying in the Penal Colonies of 18th Century Australia. In Bayt al Azif Issue 01, he presented ‘CthuReview 2017’, a look back from 2018 of the previous year in terms of Lovecraftian investigative horror and its associated segment of the gaming hobby. It covered the notable figures and their doings as well as the various publishers, projects, Kickstarters, and more. Now ‘Cthulhu in 2018: A Review’ does not look at the notable figures in the hobby, so focuses on the releases, the Kickstarters—fulfilled and unfulfilled, the highlights, and the trends. From Masks of Nyarlathotep to the Yellow King Roleplaying Game, Devil’s Swamp to Crawl-thulhu, Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos to The Shadow Over Dunsmore Point, this is an extensive overview, which again nicely chronicles the year keeps us abreast of anything that we may have missed or forgotten. (An interesting touch is that the author does include links to reviews of some of these titles—including some to Reviews from R’lyeh. Of course these look a little odd in print, but highlight the origins of the article as an online piece.)

Bayt al Azif Issue 02 has a decidedly Germanic feel to it. This is because it follows in the footsteps of Worlds of Cthulhu which adapted over the course of its six issues, content from the official German Cthulhu magazine, Cthuloide Welten. Bayt al Azif plans to draw content from another German Cthulhu magazine, Cthulhus Rus, and to that end, Bayt al Azif Issue 02 includes a number of German-sourced pieces. The first of these is Ralf Sandfuchs’ ‘Who Needs Lovecraft Country? – Why the Weimar Republic is the Best Setting for Cthulhu Games’, which espouses the virtues of interwar Germany as a setting for roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. We have already seen this potential come to the page with the publication of Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin, but this only focuses on Germany’s capital, so there is yet a supplement dedicated to Germany as a whole to be published. Certainly, this article makes the case that Germany is highly suitable and certainly, Berlin: The Wicked City is good starting point for any Keeper interested in the setting.
The content sourced from Cthulhus Rus continues with ‘False Friends’, a scenario by Philipp Christophel and Ralf Sandfuchs. Set in the 1920s and the university town of Göttingen, ‘False Friends’ is designed as an introductory scenario and is the first part of a campaign, further installments of which will appear in future issues of Bayt al Azif. A young student, recently gone up to university, missing under odd circumstances, and her worried parents ready to engage the investigators to find their daughter, will be familiar to any veteran of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying games. So on the whole, this is a comparatively simple, straightforward scenario, and whilst the background of Germany after the Great War adds a degree of social conservatism, perhaps an opportunity was missed to frame the differences between roleplaying in the USA or United Kingdom of the period and in the Weimar Republic. Like all three scenarios in Bayt al Azif Issue 02, ‘False Friends’ includes stats for both Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the GUMSHOE System of Trail of Cthulhu. 
The second scenario is Ash DelVillan’s ‘Nighted’. This is a Cthulhu by Gaslight scenario set in England in 1899, in which the player characters are invited to a masquerade at a country mansion. It is written primarily as a one-shot with pre-generated characters with links to each other and the NPCs. Like ‘False Friends’, the format is very familiar—a country house, a masked ball, a wayward host, and rooms packed with curio after curio. Then of course, it turns into a locked room situation, one with threats from without, and growing within! This drives the second half of the scenario, the first being the invitation and the manners of the player characters to stay in the mansion and await their host. It is fairly tightly plotted in terms of its timing and ratcheting up of the tension. It does deliver a nasty poke in the eye—or two—and will probably have the player characters scrambling to find a solution to their situation as lycanthropic creatures stalk the grounds outside.
There is lycanthropic theme—more obviously so, in the third scenario, ‘Beasts of Gévaudan’. As the name suggests, Bridgette Jeffries’ scenario is set in 1760s and is inspired by real events. The investigators are tasked by the crown—and some by other interested parties—to travel to the region and determine the cause of the attacks. Again, this is a one-shot, its pre-generated investigators each having their motives which should add to the tension as the relatively simple investigation is carried out. The scenario should involve a high degree of action and horror, but ultimately will present the players and their investigators with a moral choice. ‘Beasts of Gévaudan’ has enjoyable historical feel to it and should derail anyone coming to it thinking that it will be like the film, The Brotherhood of the Wolf.
A whole campaign comes under scrutiny in Lisa Padol’s ‘Adapting a Scenario – Our Ladies of Sorrow’. The editor examines the non-Call of Cthulhu modern horror campaign published by the much missed Miskatonic River Press in 2009 in some detail, highlighting some of the difficulties faced in both adapting it to Trail of Cthulhu and to the early nineteen-sixties. It is  a highly detailed, often character-focused piece that is worth the time of any Keeper wanting to run the campaign. Or indeed get some idea how to individualise any campaign, although it is very specific to Our Ladies of Sorrow. The issue with the article is that the campaign has been out of print for a decade and unless it is reprinted or a copy can be found on the second-hand market, its contents are not immediate use.
There are just two reviews in Bayt al Azif Issue 02—and they are a huge improvement upon the two reviews in Bayt al Azif Issue 01. First, Stu Horvath discusses Masks of Nyarlathotep in ‘Vintage RPG’. If his reviews in the first issue were slight and image heavy, here the author is given the space cover the history of, as much review, the new edition and it shows in being a better written, more detailed, and interesting article. For veterans of Call of Cthulhu, there will be much here that is familiar, but for anyone new to Call of Cthulhu will nevertheless, this is informative and interesting. The second review is actually of Call of Cthulhu itself, but not of Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Rather, ‘“It is not dead which can eternal lie…” Game Review: Call of Cthulhu’ is actually a review of Call of Cthulhu, First Edition by J. Eric Holmes, the editor of the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set RPG. This is fascinating continuation of Zach Howard’s ‘Clerical Cosmic Horror: The Brief Era of the Cthulhu Mythos as Dungeons & Dragons Pantheon’ from Bayt al Azif Issue 01 and he adds a commentary to the end of the review. Together they provide a contrast between a time when Cthulhu was just beginning to appear in the gaming hobby and its prevalence today.
Jared Smith, the editor of Bayt al Azif conducts two interviews in this second issue. The first, ‘Die Gesellschaft – An Interview with Cthulhus Rus’ is with the team behind Cthulhus Rus—Stefan Droste, Daniel Neugebauer, and Marc Meiburg, whilst ‘Cracking Adventures – An Interview with Lynne Hardy’ is with the Associate Editor for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Both are interesting and informative, the one with the team behind Cthulhus Rus only slightly more interesting because it is with players and authors from another Call of Cthulhu community. Jared Smith also contributes another entry in the ‘Sites of Antiquity’ series, this time ‘Temple of Melqart at Marat’ and suggests how the ruined Phoenician temple could be used with the Mythos.
Rounding out Bayt al Azif Issue 02 is the next part of Evan Johnston’s ‘Grave Spirits’. In Bayt al Azif Issue 01, this story took the central character of a doctor into Red Hook, but it was very much set-up and needed more episodes to develop the story. This part does and so delivers more impact and horror. It will be interesting to see where the story goes.
Physically, Bayt al Azif Issue 02 is a step forward in terms of production values and look. The layout is cleaner, tidier, and not as cramped or fiddly. The images are better handled and the is writing better.
Bayt al Azif Issue 02 is a better issue than Bayt al Azif Issue 01. It benefits from longer articles and a more diverse range of voices. In particular, the content from Cthulhus Rus opens up an aspect of the Call of Cthulhu community which would otherwise be inaccessible to the predominately English-speaking community, and of course, the scenarios are not only well done, but they also highlight Bayt al Azif as a vehicle for scenarios that whilst good, are not necessarily commercial enough to be published by Chaosium, Inc., Pelgrane Press, or a licensee. If there is perhaps an issue with the series it is that many of the articles around the scenario are about Call of Cthulhu rather than for Call of Cthulhu. So, there is no mechanical, historical, or background support for the roleplaying game and that does mean that neither a Keeper nor player has reason to come back to Bayt al Azif Issue 02.
Overall, Bayt al Azif Issue 02 is a good second issue, much improved on the first. Its better sense of professionalism is combined with a good range of voices, scenarios, and articles about Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. 

I will remember to this one right!

So continuing with the music of the time when the BECMI sets were new here is some music from 1985!

I created this playlist last year to celebrate the start of Stranger Things Season 3. Which, truth be told, has done a lot to get people back into D&D.

So here are the songs from then.

Last week I talked about the adventure Quagmire for the Expert set.  Earlier I talked about the adventure Death's Ride for the Companion set.  What do these both have in common?  They were the genesis points of a reoccurring bad guy in my games, Magnus Ulslime, the Chaotic.


Magnus, as he was most often known in my games, is not just an awesome reoccurring bad guy, he was my testbed for all sorts of evil, death-priest, warlock style characters.

Anytime a new version of D&D would come around I would roll up a new Johan Werper as the son of the previous one, either as a LG Cleric or Paladin.  I'd attempt to make a version of Larina.  And I would make a version of Magnus.  But unlike Johan, who is a different character each time but always a LG holy warrior, or Larina who was a reincarnation of her previous version and always a witch, Magnus was always something different.  I would always go with the class that would give me the best evil traits.  In Basic he was a evil Cleric. In AD&D1 a Death Master, in 2nd Ed he started out as a Druid and then became a Necromancer.  When I switch over to 100% Ravenloft in my college years the cover of Ship of Horror and the evil necromancer Meredoth also had a huge influence on me.  As it turns out Meredoth would be revealed as an expatriate of the Mystaran country of Alphatia.
In 3rd Ed...well there were some many choices that I eventually made 6 different versions.  You can see some of that in my Buffy adventures The Dark Druid and The Dead of Night.  In 4e I used him as a test of the Death Pact Warlock that never saw the light of day under 4e.  It did, however, affect the writing I did for my warlock books.

Magnus Ulslime became my poster boy for warlocks soon after I got a copy of 4e.
I tried him out in several different ways mixing in bits of cleric, wizard, and especially necromancer.
In my Strange Brew: Warlock book for Pathfinder I introduce both Cthonic and Death Pact warlocks.  I expand on those ideas from a different point of view in my more recent book, The Warlock for Old-School Essentials.  In both cases, I made Magnus a Death Pact warlock.  It was a much better representation of how I saw the character.  He made a trade to Death for more power in the mortal world.

Magnus for BECMI
If I rerun Death's Ride again for any version of the game I'd like to replace Ulslime the Cleric with Magnus Ulslime the Warlock.  For 3rd to 5th Edition of D&D this is not a big deal.  But BECMI does not have a warlock.

No. But Old-School Essentials and Swords & Wizardry do.

My warlock for Old-School Essentials is a B/X style warlock with Death Pacts.  But it only goes to 14th level.  My warlock for Swords & Wizardry goes to 20th level (the level I want Magnus at) but it doesn't have Death pacts.  No problem. I designed the books to work together like this.  By combining them I can get the exact warlock I want.  If I need more death or necromancy themed spells



Magnus Ulslime, the Chaotic
20th level Death Pact Warlock
Lodge: Sixth Circle, Masters of the Undying

Str: 10
Int: 18
Wis: 16
Dex: 10
Con: 15
Cha: 18

HP: 66
AC: 2 (mage armor, phantom shield, ring +2)

Invocations (10)
Arcane Blast, Agonizing Blast, Armor of Shadows, Aura of Fear, Claws of the Ghoul, Eldritch Sight, Form of the Undead Horror, Mask of Many Faces, The Wasting, Whispers of the Grave

Spells
Cantrips (6): Aura Reading, Daze, Detect Curse, Mend, Message, Object Reading
1st level (7): Arcane Dart, Corpse Servent, Häxen Talons, Feel My Pain, Mage Armor, Phantom Shield, Taint
2nd level (7): Augury, Aura of Chaos, Corpse Walking, Death Knell, Grasp of the Endless War, Speak with the Dead, Ward of Harm
3rd level (6): Bestow Curse, Black Lightning, Cackling Skull, Corpse Candle, Lifesteal, Rage
4th level (6): Animate Dead, Crystal Visions, Extend Spell (Lesser), Fear, Spell Storing, Undead Compulsion
5th level (6): Bad Luck (Run of Bad Luck), Death Candle, Death Curse, Dreadful Bloodletting, Song of the Night, Winds of Limbo

Magic items: Amulet of Chaos, Pentacle Rod, Ring of Protection +2, Staff of the Warlock,

Not too bad really.  I might have to go more "BECMI" and raise him to 25th or 36th level!

While I am playing around, here is a 5th Edition version to use in my 5e Converted Death's Ride.

Tournaments of Madness and Death is a scenario anthology for Crypts & Things: A Swords & Sorcery Roleplaying Game. Published by D101 Games, this is a grim and dark, Old School Renaissance retroclone which draws its inspiration from Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber, and L. Sprague de Camp’s Swords and Sorcery anthology. Tournaments of Madness and Death presents two scenarios—almost an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ side, almost because you cannot turn the book over to run either—and more. Both scenarios are designed for a party of between three and six characters of between Fourth and Fifth Levels; both are self-contained, but can be added to a Game Master’s own Crypts & Things campaign, whether one of her design or the default setting of The Continent of Terror; and notably, also designed to be run at conventions.

In fact, this is an important aspect of the two scenarios in Tournaments of Madness and Death. As written, both ‘The Furnace’ and ‘The Tomb of the Evil Emperor’ are designed to be run—and have been run—within a four-hour convention game slot and both include information to that end as part of their advice on how to stage them. In addition, the ‘more’ to Tournaments of Madness and Death includes the equivalent of an insert, slipped between the two scenarios. This is ‘Dark, Delicious and Deadly’, which explains how the author runs Crypts & Things at conventions. This focuses on what makes Crypts & Things different, keeping up the pace—as necessary, rewarding exploration and interaction, how to handle the flow of monsters in the game (primarily, do not over do it), and how to structure the game over the four-hour convention window. It is really good advice for anyone running this style of game and so could be applied to any number of retroclones. If there is an issue with the advice, it is that the author does not quite completely adhere to it himself. The advice states that the Game Master should use pre-generated characters to give out to the players rather than have them create them at the table, which just takes time. So why are there none given for either scenario?

The ‘A’ side or ‘The Furnace’ takes the player characters to the City of Eternal Shadow under Iron Moon chained above and onto the Iron Moon itself. In ages past, the powerful ancient immortals known as the Nine pulled the moon from the heavens and used it to imprison for the evil tyrant, The Mad Tzar. Now, chunks are falling from the Iron Moon onto the city below and everyone is fleeing the city of the dead for fear that the demonic Mad Tzar is about to break free. Can he be prevented from escaping? Will the adventurers come to the aid of the White Wizard Arksal, the last of the Nine? The adventurers have scope for a little investigation in the city before finding their way onto the Iron Moon, though the scenario is very much not investigative in nature. There are secrets to be found in the city below however—and the scenario highlights these as one of the features of Crypts & Things—and these hint that there is something more to this straightforward prevention of The Mad Tzar’s rebirth.

Once on the Iron Moon, the adventurers find themselves in the prison crypt of The Mad Tzar. Like most tombs in most fantasy roleplaying games, it is essentially linear and full of traps and the odd puzzle. There are more secrets to be found, but the dungeon design is itself not terribly interesting. In fact, run as a standard adventure it might even be a bit dull, but run at the suggested pace of a convention game and the players are unlikely to notice. It works to throw a challenge or three into the path of the adventurers to get them to the scenario’s denouement. This is a whole lot more excitement and escalates the danger that the player characters will face as the climax builds and builds. It is a challenging, big knockdown of a fight ending to the scenario and exactly what you want in a convention scenario.

The ‘B’ Side, ‘The Tomb of the Evil Emperor’ brings the adventurers to the tomb of an emperor so vile his name has been intentionally forgotten from the history of the Continent of Terror. He and his city—now known as the Grand Debris—were smashed when a meteor was pulled down onto his palace, which then became his tomb. Now a cult dedicated to his worship, the Scarlet Riders, has smashed its way through the town of Zonos, the City of the Exiles which immediately abuts the walls surrounding the Grand Debris, and into the ruins beyond. There they plan to awaken the Evil Emperor to once again cast his vile rule over the land as in ages past.

This is a much stronger adventure. Although it is still direct in its structure, there is more for the player characters to explore, the encounters are varied, and there is greater scope for roleplaying and exploration. The locations, whether a dissolute court of a governor’s palace or the remains of the Evil Emperor’s Palace under a meteorite, are simply more interesting and the Game Master has a few more NPCs to portray. There is also a ghoulish sensibility to ‘The Tomb of the Evil Emperor’ and if played as part of a campaign, there are more elements to bring into the Game Master’s campaign.

The two scenarios in Tournaments of Madness and Death are similarly structured. Each consists of an introduction or hook, a small urban area for the player characters to explore and perhaps investigate, a connecting adventure section—either an actual dungeon or a dungeon-like area, and finally, a big battle at the end. These elements fit into the suggested timings for running as convention scenarios. They also each deal with the two subjects of the title. Madness in two ways. First in the madness of the locations, the Iron Moon chained over the City of Eternal Shadow of ‘Furnace’ and the palace and city smashed under a meteorite in ‘The Tomb of the Evil Emperor’, as well as in the madness of unleashing unrivalled evil upon the Continent of Terror. Then there is the death that will be unleashed should the player characters fail. That said, there is a sense of familiarity to the locations in both scenarios—a city under a moon and then a smaller city abutting the walls of a much larger, smashed and broken city—that echo elements and locations in Greg Stafford’s Glorantha.

Physically, Tournaments of Madness and Death is slightly disappointing. It definitely needs an edit. However, it is easy enough to read and the maps are quite lovely. The artwork is really rather good and has a weird, often creepy, feel to it, and so fits the grim dark tone of Crypts & Things.

Tournaments of Madness and Death is a solid pair of convention scenarios, accompanied by good advice for running them at such events. In fact, the advice is worth reading by anyone who wants to run a fantasy roleplaying scenario at a convention. Of the two scenarios, ‘The Tomb of the Evil Emperor’ is the better and one that would make a good addition to a campaign. 

Noah Berlatsky / June 18, 2020

Joanna Russ
By Gwyneth Jones
University of Illinois Press (2019)

Gwyneth Jones’s new critical biography of Joanna Russ for the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series (called simply Joanna Russ) seems less like an academic reconsideration than a continuation of its subject’s oeuvre. That is part of Joanna Russ’s peculiar genius. Her most famous novel, The Female Man (1975), is (as Jones deftly explains) itself a critical biography of her self, in which four versions of Russ meet and interrogate each other’s motivations, desires, and fates across somewhat more than four different worlds. “The novel’s séance-like structure of competing voices is fiction laid bare,” Jones explains, as her own book becomes another “twisted braid of the author’s mind.” The volume is a polyvocal analysis of a polyvocal analysis, speaking to and about a Joanna who is speaking to and about Joanna. Jones and Joanna (as Jones calls her throughout) are not subject and object, but sister speakers together, most alike when their voices are most individual.

Russ is best known for her science fiction, a genre in which she experimented, and with which she argued, throughout her life. That argument, as Jones makes clear, was primarily a feminist one. In her 1972 critical essay “What Can a Heroine Do?: or Why Women Can’t Write,” Russ declared in all caps “WOMEN CANNOT WRITE—USING THE OLD MYTHS. BUT USING NEW ONES?”

Science fiction and fantasy, with their postulation of distant or future worlds, allowed a rejiggering or reimagining of realism’s tropes, and therefore of realism’s patriarchy. In The Female Man, one instance of Joanna named Jeannine, a younger, sadder, still heterosexual self, wanders through a drab, timid world waiting to marry some drab, timid man. Meanwhile, another instance, Janet, fights duels to the death with rapiers (“apparently, since that’s the kind of scar Janet Evason has to show—though we never see the rapiers,” Jones offers, in a very Russ-like aside) on the all-female alternate timeline of Whileaway. These alternate Joannas are joined by Joanna herself, both as in-novel character and as an authorial voice that comments on her own fictional creations as they appear and disappear from each other’s worlds. The novel is then a realist story (both in the sense that we visit Jeannine’s drab grey realist world and in the sense that Joanna is speaking as her real self). But it’s also an exploration of a science fiction alternative to realism, as the self-confident, unquenchable Janet deftly thumps would-be assaulters in our world, and has duels and adventures in her own lesbian all-female utopia.

The science fiction world of Whileaway gives women room and breadth for feminism. But Jones, and/or Russ, are careful to document the ways in which science fiction itself was mired in the all-too-real conventions of misogyny. Russ’s work was attacked as an exercise in angry man-hating by male SF writers like Poul Anderson and Philip K.Dick, and Russ was frequently frustrated that Ursula K. LeGuin, the most prominent woman writer in the genre, wrote almost exclusively male protagonists.

Russ’s 1978 novel The Two of Them is, in Jones’s brilliant reading, a violent rejection of the science fiction establishment. The novel is the story of Irene Waskiewicz, a transtemporal agent working with her partner Ernst Neumann on a trade deal with the world of Ka’abeh. Women on Ka’abeh are brutally segregated and subjugated. Irene is outraged and arranges the rescue of a young girl, Zubeydeh, who wants to be a poet in contravention of her society’s norms. Irene assumes that Ernst, her lover, will be horrified by Ka’abeh, and that he, like the science fiction genre, will want to free women’s writing. But Ernst drags his feet and warns Irene that their superiors will not support her. Eventually, Irene has to kill him.

The Two of Them becomes not about how Irene and Ernst adventure together, but about how Irene and Zubeydeh have to stand against male institutions on both of their worlds. “As a young woman, longing for escape,” Jones explains,

Russ had found refuge in sf without noticing, perhaps without caring, that women as agents were usually excluded from the game. She’d been faithful for years: explaining science fiction to itself; excusing its faults and trying to transform it even as an ‘out’ lesbian feminist. Maybe she still wanted the relationship to work, as the seventies drew to a close. But her belief in the mission was shaken, and her unease was growing. Was the increasingly difficult position, as an exceptional woman in a male-ordered organization, even morally tenable?

Jones is a science fiction writer herself, and the disillusionment here doesn’t just belong to Russ. Indeed, part of the brilliance of Jones’s discussion of the novel is the way it shifts the meaning of the title again, so that “the two of them” means not Irene and Ernst, and not Irene and Zubeydeh, but Joanna and the community of women in science-fiction, or, specifically, Joanna and Jones. Jones’s reading rescues Joanna from science fiction, just as Joanna’s novel rescues the writers, like Jones, who follow in her interdimensional path.

Jones follows in that path not just as a science-fiction writer, but as a critic. Joanna Russ provides not just careful consideration of the novels, but of Russ’s own reviews and essays. Her critical voice, like Jones’s, is thoughtful, sharp, and delightfully funny. Non-scholars will need to read the book to find out which one of them refers to Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane as “sub-Tolkien” fantasy, and which says that it is a “daydream of Byronic suffering and self-importance… that could easily have been cut by three-quarters.”

By giving criticism and fiction equal weight, Jones (or is that Joanna?) shows with rare clarity how each is embedded in each. Russ’s great 1977 novel We Who Are About To is in large part a critical dissection of the shipwrecked colonization novel. A small passenger vessel crash-lands on a distant planet, and most of the men on board decide they need to start a breeding program to populate the world. The narrator, though, recognizes that they will never be rescued and can’t live on a planet with no usable food or water; she refuses to be raped for a hopeless colonial dream. And so she kills them all.

The book could almost be one of Russ’s devastating reviews—while, for her part, Jones’s analysis of the book is in part an exercise in cross-genre fiction writing. “I found it fun to think of [the characters in We Who Are About Too] as stagecoach passengers—dumped out of their hospitable nineteenth-century world and stranded in hostile Indian country. Beset by peril, these mismatched strangers need a common cause. They don’t realize that the puny outlaw hidden in their midst [i.e., the narrator], who swiftly becomes their scapegoat, is also their nemesis.” Fiction functions as criticism, and criticism involves fictional rewriting. Puncturing imperialist dreams, for Jones and Joanna, is an act of both analysis and imagination. To get to a different and better world you need to be able to cut the old one up and build it anew.

These acts of destruction and creation, of reimagining and remaking, are collaborative. Russ’s vital personal and professional friendships with Samuel Delany and Alice Sheldon dip in and out of Jones’s narrative, as does Russ’s engagement with science fiction, with feminism, and with her teacher Vladimir Nabokov. For that matter, the book reads in many ways as an extended conversation between the protagonists, Jones and Joanna, as they argue, agree, inspire, or think with each other, or near each other, or within each other. It’s a collaboration.

It’s also an elaboration of Russ’s feminist utopian visions of a society that has changed so completely that women can actually talk to each other—or of a feminist utopian vision in which women talking to each other is powerful enough to change the world. Jones (or is that Joanna?) was no doubt inspired by Joanna (or perhaps Jones?) when she wrote in another fiction, which was also another critique: “I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free together, with no bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there…”

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

Ah.  Death's Ride.  I have such fond memories of this adventure.

CM2 Death's Ride: Retrospective
Death's Ride is one of a few adventures I have had the privilege to both play in and to run. While overtly for the D&D Basic rules, Companion set, it can be run (and we did) under AD&D. Though some of the special features were lost I think.

I bought this module and gave it to my DM to run back in the day and I ran it using the 3.x version of the D&D rules and then again most recently using the 5th Edition rules.

The Barony of Two Lakes Vale gave us ample room to move about and try different things, but then it was the NPCs that captured my attention the most. Ulslime, Wazor, and Korbundar lived on in my games for many more years with both Ulsime and Korbundar even threatening my players in the 3rd Ed. game. One, and I am not sure if he was an NPC in the game or one my DM made up, went on to torture my characters for many more adventures after this.

The Death Portal was an interesting bit of necromantic trickery to get the players something to focus on and the new monsters were a lot of fun (the Death Leech nearly took out my characters back in the 80s.)

But before I wax too much more into nostalgia, let's review this adventure proper.

CM2 Death's Ride: Review
by Garry Spiegle, art by Jeff Easley, 32 pages, color covers, black & white interior art.
I am reviewing both the DriveThruRPG PDF and my original copy from 1984.

Death's Ride is one of our first Companion level adventures.  The code for this series in CM, since C was already taken.  Both CM1 Test of the Warlords (with it's Warduke-like cover) and CM2 Death's Ride were designed to be introductions to Companion level play. Both were supposedly designed to work with each other, both being set in Norwold.  However, they really don't work together other than this thin thread of Norwold.  That does not detract from its enjoyment.

The basic premise is this.

The adventurers, already powerful and famous in their own right, are summoned to the Barony of Twolakes Vale by King Ericall of Norwold (Background on King Ericall is given in Companion adventure CM1.) The local baron, Sir Maltus Fharo, has sent no taxes, caravans, or messages in several months. A small body of troops sent by the king to investigate has not returned. At this time, Ericall doesn't have the resources to send a large body of troops, so he is asking the characters to go to the barony, find out what's wrong, and if possible, restore contact. The king gives the characters a royal warrant and permission to act in his name.

The problem is much worse than the King suspects. A gateway to the “Sphere of Death” has been opened in Two Lakes Vale. It's up to the characters to determine who or what opened the gate. They must also close the gate forever. The characters should not actually enter the Sphere of Death in this adventure; their goal is to close the gate. Twolakes Vale holds only an inflow portal from the sphere. Consider any character who actually reaches the Sphere of Death as killed (or at least removed from the campaign until other characters can launch a formal rescue operation).

Here they will encounter death, destruction and our three main Antagonists. Wazor an "Atlantean Mage", Ulslime a cleric of "Death" and our cover boy Korbundar the huge blue dragon.  No, the skeleton riding him does not appear anywhere in this adventure. Nor does the lake of fire.

By the way. Which one do you think is Wazor and which one is Ulslime?The adventure proceeds on a location-based adventure.  The characters move from location to location in the Twolakes Vale, which is described well except for where it is exactly in Norwold, finding clues, fighting enemies. Until the final confrontation and destruction of the artifact (the "deathstone") opening the Sphere of Death. Of course, you need another artifact to do that.

The NPCs are very detailed and out trio of bad-guys are so much fun that both Ulslime and Korbundar were made into semi-permanent NPCs of note in my games.    It got to the point where my kids would be like "Is that Korbundar!!" anytime a blue dragon was used in a game.

The other issue with this adventure, and one that was lost on me until recently, is that is doesn't really fully feel like something from the Companion Set.  It has been described, by most notably by Jonathan Becker at B/X Blackrazor, that this adventure really runs like a high-level Expert set adventure.  A wilderness hex with various points within the hex that need to be investigated.
There are some of the new monsters in the adventure, but when I played it and ran through it we substituted the monsters from AD&D/D&D3 as the case required.  There are Wrestling Ratings to the monsters and a chance to raise an army, but nothing about domains or ruling kingdoms.
Of course, this would all come later on in the CM adventures, so I guess that is not too big of a deal.

Calling it a "High-level dungeon crawl" or "High-level Expert Set Adventure" is fair, but it leaves out a lot of what made this particular adventure so much fun. I still have my original copy of this and it holds up well.   So despite the criticisms of it as a "Companion Adventure", it is still a very fun "D&D Adventure" and one that holds up.

CM2 Death's Ride: Refit
I have no idea how much I paid for my copy of Death's Ride when it first came out. How much were modules back then? $5? $8?  Whatever it was I certainly got my money's worth. (the consensus online is $6.)

Back in 1985-5 when I went through as a player we used AD&D 1st Ed rules.  Seemed like the logical thing to do.  We stuck it on the end of this huge campaign that also included H4.



When I would later run it again in college it became part of my big "Ravenloft is From Mystara" deal and I ran it under AD&D 2nd Ed.   It usually became the gateway characters used to leave Ravenloft and come back into their normal world.


Now I am setting up to run it again, this time using the 5th Edition Rules.

For that, I joined the Classic Modules Today group and did the 5th edition conversion.


I had a great time not only converting the adventure and creatures, but getting a chance to re-do Wazor, Ulslime, and Korbundar as 5th edition characters.  It was a struggle I have to admit not to include *my* versions of them and instead play them by the book.

In the conversion guide I mention where I would place the adventure in the Forgotten Realms (something we all did) and how it could connect to others.  For me I saw this as a nice Coda to the Out of the Abyss adventure.



Characters will complete Out of the Abyss at roughly the same level characters would need to be to start Death’s Ride. The adventure can be seen as either as some last-ditch effort by Orcus to open a portal in the Realms in which to invade or as a means of flooding the area with undead.

This flows from both my using Death's Ride as part of an Orcus/Realms take-over (Module H4) and my connections to Ravenloft as a portal.

I might not have know the Companion Set very well, but there is at least one Companion level adventure I do know.

A slightly different sort of Class Struggles today.
Yesterday I reviewed the Companion Set Rules.  Within those rules some new "sub-classes" or "traveling classes" were introduced.  Let me summarize here.

Druids are Neutral clerics of 9th level or greater dedicated to the cause of Nature. They are non-land owning and not devoted to another lord or cause.
Knight a Neutral (or any alignment) traveling fighter, that is a non-land owning fighter. Must swear fealty to a royal ruler.
Paladin a Lawful traveling fighter who swears fealty to a Lawful church.
Avenger a Chaotic traveling fighter who swears allegiance to a Chaotic church.

There are others, such as Guildmasters and Magists, but those four are the focus of my attention this week.


Looking over the rules I can't help but think of how much these resemble what would be known as a Prestige Class in 3.x D&D.  In fact let's make a direct comparison between the Avenger and the Blackguard, an evil fighter prestige class.

According to the d20 SRD for 3.0 a Blackguard must meet the following requirements.  I am putting D&D BECMI equivalent translations in brackets [].
Alignment: Any evil.  [chaotic]
Base Attack Bonus: +6. [at least 6th level]
Skills: Hide 5 ranks, Knowledge (religion) 2 ranks. [again at least 6th level with some knowledge of religion so high wisdom is good]
Feats: Cleave, Improved Sunder, Power Attack. [knows some combat maneuvers]
Special: The character must have made peaceful contact with an evil outsider who was summoned by him or someone else.  [makes allegiances to an evil religion.]

Given the systems, the Blackguard is pretty much the same as an Avenger.
Back in the 3.x days, there was even a Paladin Prestige Class that you had to be a fighter or a cleric to qualify for.  It made a lot of sense to me.


So a Knight, Paladin, and the Avenger can all be seen rather easily seen as BECMI Prestige Classes.
In 3e, Prestige Classes were designed to be open to any class, but some were easier to get into if you started in the right class. Some were limited to class, but not "on paper" so a Prestige Class limited only to clerics could say "must be able to cast divine spells" or "ability to turn undead."  Yeah, it was sneaky, but a fighter could take a level of cleric and be able to get in.

So I am thinking that in BECMI prestige classes would have to be "Base Class" specific.
What do I mean by "Base Class?" Well, these are your Cleric, Fighter, Magi-User, and Theif classes.
In D&D 3.x a difference is made between a Base Class and a Prestige Class.   Why would I even care?  Well, looking at classes in this light gives me a ton of new options.  For starters it allows me to be able to add classes to my BECMI games and not add the bloat of an extra set of class rules.  It also allows me to explore all sorts of other options for a class.
It also allows me to have these new classes, often treated like a multi-class or dual-class without the need for a bunch of messing with double noting of XP rewards.

There are other examples.
The book GAZ3: Principalities of Glantri covers the Seven Secret Crafts of Magic in Glantri.  Each one of these could be seen as Magic-user specific prestige classes.  The Master's set introduced the Shaman and Wokani classes.  Not to mention all the various "witch-like" classes I have covered from other BECMI books.  I am sure there are more to be honest with you, I just have not had the chance to dig them all up yet.

BECMI Prestige Classes

How then can you use the 3.x Prestige Classes, or for that matter 2nd ed. Kits, 4e Paragon Paths or 5e sub-classes, in BECMI?  Simple find classes that work for you first.

So I am going to start up a BECMI campaign and I know that one of my sons is going to want to play an assassin and the other will want to play a ranger.

Both classes are in AD&D and in most versions of the game.   How can I bring them in?

Well, the simple solution is to import the class wholesale, but I guess at that point why not just play AD&D?  I want something that is more Basic-feeling.  I would need to add some more details, but here are some ideas.

Acrobat
A thief that steals not for profit or personal gain but instead for the thrills and even the challenge could become an Acrobat.  These thieves can be Neutral and even some Lawful.  I would follow the guidelines in the Unearthed Arcana.

Assassin
This class was removed from AD&D 2nd Ed and absent in D&D 3e as a base class.  It does exist as a 3e Prestige Class and a 5e Sub-class. In the case of 3e the fastest way in is to start out as a Rogue.  In 5e you have to be a Rogue first.  The 5e SRD only lists one sub-class or archetype, the Thief.
The BECMI Assassin starts out as a Thief but at some point becomes an assassin.  I am going to say 8th or 9th level, and they would need to be Chaotic. They can use poison, but a limited number of weapons, armor, and no shields.

Illusionist
These are Magic-users that focus completely on Illusion Magic. They have their own spell lists like the druid does.  They do not build their own towers but are often entertainer magicians for courts and other notables of power.

Ranger
These are fighters that are dedicated to nature, much like the druid, and focus on a particular enemy.
They cannot become Lords or Ladies, but instead, have a small stronghold.  Fighters of 9th level or higher may become rangers.

These ideas can be easily extended.

Necromancers
Have their own spell list. Do not build towers but may take over any ruins. Command undead.  The existence of Illusionists and Necromancers could also imply other schools of magic like AD&D 2nd Speciality wizards.  I suppose I could just import those. Other options are like the School of Magic in Glantri.

Bards
Oh man, these guys in AD&D are a mess.  But I would steal a page from 2nd Ed and make them Thief-like and have them improve their fighting skills a little and give them some druid magic.  OR go the Celtic route and make them part of the Cleric class.  Still thinking on this one.

Looking at 3.x a few jump out right away.  In addition to the Blackguard and the Assassin, I can easily see adapting the Arcane Archer for elves and the Dwarven Delver for Dwarves.



There can be many, many more.  With five other editions of *D&D to choose from there is no end to what could be done. 

Now I am sure some people might complain about "class bloat" and that is a fair argument.  I think keeping to the base four (or base five if you count my witch) then adding the other Prestige Classes on an as-needed basis. 

Or, even closer to the spirit of the rules, add these as "role-playing guides" only.  I mean really what is to stop a player from saying "my elf is an arcane archer!" and make the choice to only use a bow?  Maybe the DM and the group can decide that this elf can add +1 to hits with their bow due to their dedication.  Simple fix and no new rules added!

Make some use out of that multitude of books I own.

Mark Sheridan / June 16, 2020

The 1970s have always occupied a grim place in the British imagination. Sandwiched between Harold Wilson’s utopian “Swinging Sixties” and Thatcher’s anti-social eighties, the decade represents a time of tremendous turbulence and change. With the empire in ruins, anti-colonial backlash came home to roost as Northern Ireland descended into civil war and the IRA began its bombing campaign in Britain. The naked enthusiasm of the post-war consensus dissipated, and the battle between labor and industry heated up. Bombs, blackouts, and shortages recalled war-like conditions during a time of supposed peace. Modern scholarship has pointed to an eerie style in British cultural output from the period. From its cinema to its television to its public information films, there pervades a gothic sensibility commonly identified with Mark Fisher’s concept of “hauntology,” the idea that the present state of cultural paralysis is a function of a collective mourning for futures that never materialized.

The dark and mystic sensibility that emerged from this disruptive and paranoid milieu, now called “folk horror,” manifests a fear of sublimation—the absorption of the individual into the mass, the human into the environment, modernity into the unknown. While the horror of Hammer Films and Roger Corman that had dominated the ‘50s and ‘60s was preoccupied with endless combinations of 19th century gothic, folk horror steps outside time as we understand it, beyond the scope of the human. In the 2010 documentary series A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss outlined a rough canon for this folk horror tradition based on the unholy trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Intense ideological conflict pervades these stories: Witchfinder General is set in and around the Battle of Naseby, where Cromwell’s revolutionary New Model Army destroyed the veteran feudal forces of King Charles, and tells the story of a soldier who pursues a charlatan witch-hunter across the English countryside. And in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, set around the same time, a secular magistrate must slay a demon summoned from “the forest, from the furrows, from the fields” by the local pagan cult.

These historical tales come at us from the dawn of modern time, in the midst of feudal collapse and the emergence of capitalism. Our heroes are rational, secular agents of the state; our villains the ancient forces of paganistic superstition that batter at the door of our burgeoning technological world. It’s telling that the only film in Gatiss’s trilogy set in contemporary times, The Wicker Man, advances a very different view of the battle between the rational modern and the primordial other. Here, the heroic agent of the state, in this case a police officer, dies alone in the flames of the titular effigy, while the villagers dance in rings around him. Christopher Lee would go on to insist that The Wicker Man was not actually a horror film, an assertion that hints at the sublimation of genre itself, and how this paranoid affect had settled over the British imagination like an eerie fog.

Well before The Wicker Man hit theaters, however, there was the television play Robin Redbreast (1970), which tells a similar story: middle-class metropolitan Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) ventures into the English countryside only to find herself caught up in the fatal fertility rites of the polytheistic locals. Robin Redbreast is noteworthy for its appearance on Play for Today, a BBC anthology series typically reserved for kitchen-sink realist drama that has been described in posterity as everything from a “national theatre of the air” to an “[exercise] in viewer patronisation” (the latter quote coming from current Conservative Party MP and Boris Johnson ally, Michael Gove). Abrasive, polemical, socially conscious to a fault, its moral messaging embodied the paternalistic spirit of the ‘60s welfare state. If television was the medium of the masses, Play for Today was its conscience.

Set in the present day, Robin Redbreast inverts the conventional relationship between the modern and the un-modern, configuring our world as hopelessly encompassed by a dark architecture of the outside. From the moment Norah arrives in the village, she’s deprived of all agency. Everything she does is preempted, public and private spaces are intermeshed—the villagers always seem to know what she’s doing in advance, repeatedly wander onto her property without invitation, and even orchestrate events so that she ends up sleeping with Rob (Andy Bradford), an awkward local man who she first encounters practicing karate naked in the woods.

Norah can sense she’s being manipulated in some way but remains powerless to stop it. The menacing Mr. Fisher (Bernard Hepton), apparent leader of the community, even explains their sinister designs, albeit in elliptical language, at various junctures. Yet Norah is unable to resist literal and metaphorical seduction by the strange persuasions of the village folk. There’s a dark implication that in some respect Norah wants, or is at least allowing herself, to be trapped. The heightened emotions of country life contrast starkly against the bourgeois detachment of her conversations with city friends. To an extent, we get the impression that Norah’s volatile relationship with the villagers is a reaction to her own suppressed Dionysian impulses.

The shadowed social commentary is compounded when Fisher explains that the villagers are under no pretense of doing justice to the “old ways.” He admits the basis of the robin sacrifice could be Greek, Egyptian, even Mexican in origin. He mentions James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough,” a largely discredited work of comparative mythology that serves as the basis for most popular representations of paganism. Historical authenticity is immaterial here. What scares us about paganism is what it tells us about ourselves, how it recalls our own innate strangeness.

After the ritual slaughter of Rob (short for Robin), a pregnant Norah flees the village, but her escape will never be complete. She knows that the same cycle will repeat itself when her baby, the new robin, comes of age. As she drives away, she looks back to find that the villagers, still watching from the cottage, have transformed into pagan deities. The fact that the villagers do nothing to stop her from returning to the city amplifies the play’s paranoid pessimism. As Fisher, having taken the form of Herne the Hunter, watches Norah disappear over the hill, the viewer is left with the horrible feeling that nothing Norah can do will have any impact on the ultimate fate of her unborn child. (The narrative is clearly inspired in part by Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby).

Robin Redbreast’s horror is reactive, bird-brained—evoking the feeling of being cornered. The great fear is a lack of control, the feeling of being swept away by strange currents beyond the self. Even in her fleeing, Norah’s fate is ultimately foreclosed by forces that not only surround her but exist elementally within her. If Witchfinder General is set at the dawn of modernity, Robin Redbreast is set at modernity’s dusk, in a world that shrinks from itself as it feels the darkness loom ahead. The postponed reclamation of the robin proves a compelling metaphor for the hopeless uncertainty of a historical moment in which strange futures pounded on the door of the present, threatening to break in at any moment.

* * *

The first three years of the 1970s would see five states of emergency, each presided over by Ted Heath’s Conservative government following its surprise election in 1970, and each involving battles between Heath and what Thatcher would later refer to as “the enemy within”—the labor movement. Problems continued to pile up, each new disruption amplifying the last. The stock market crashed in January 1973, sending inflation soaring into double figures; then, in October, OPEC declared an oil embargo that set the western world reeling. Seeing an opportunity, the National Union of Mineworkers voted to go on strike in pursuit of fairer pay. Heath’s government responded by introducing the infamous Three-Day Week, in which consumption of electricity was to be limited to three non-consecutive days per week to conserve coal supplies. For two months, Britain was plunged into a cold, dark winter unlike anything it had seen since wartime.

Described by The Times as a “fight to the death between the government and the miners,” this was the second large-scale confrontation in as many years and one the government couldn’t afford to lose. Heath resolved to call an election to serve as a referendum on the issue of union power, with the Conservatives campaigning on the slogan “Who governs Britain?” The election of February 28, 1974 returned yet another dramatic development: despite the weight of the media and the state behind them, the Conservatives had in fact lost ground and handed the Labour Party a plurality in parliament. A settlement was soon reached in which the strikers secured a 35% pay-increase—the miners had won, at least for now.

Two weeks after the lifting of restrictions, millions of Britons tuned in to BBC1 to watch the latest installment of Play for Today. That evening’s episode was Penda’s Fen, a fittingly unsettling exploration of unsettling times, the most developed folk horror film to date, and a triumph of public programming in its own right. Writer David Rudkin gives voice to the dark song of the fields with a visionary script about a devout young Christian who must confront both the unseen forces that stir beneath the village where he lives and the “unnatural” desires that emerge contrary to his pious pretensions.

Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks) is a boy possessed by the “new gods”—he is ordered, anal, orthodox, patriotic, loyal to the structures of church and state. He’s the kind of kid that almost deserves the vicious bullying he gets from his grammar school classmates. As Stephen matures into his eighteenth year, however, things fall apart as he discovers that he’s both gay and adopted. Through the mentorship of his heretical parson father, a politically radical local playwright, and a series of disturbing apparitions, he begins to come to terms with his inner “ungovernableness.”

Director Alan Clarke, Britain’s mirror-holder-in-chief behind such brutal portraits as Elephant (1989) and Made in Britain (1982), presents an image of Britishness that’s wild, diverse, almost ethereal. Clarke, typically known for his uncompromising realism, adopts a more hallucinogenic style to portray the metaphysical turbulence of Stephen’s new understandings. The haunted, shifting landscapes of Worcestershire work as a kind of demonic mutation of Situationist psychogeography. Whereas the students of May 1968 were implored to uncover “the beach beneath the streets,” Clarke and Rudkin invite us to discover the flames beneath the fen.

Penda’s Fen stands apart from other artifacts of the “wyrd” in its overt politicization of strangeness. Almost immediately we meet the playwright Arne (Ian Hogg) as he puts up a one-man defense of the strikers at a town hall debate, while naïve Little Englander Stephen huffs and puffs in the audience. As Stephen begins to lose, or rather relinquish, control of himself, his grades suffer and his mother warns him not to fall foul of “the machine,” the inhuman conveyor belt of modernity and its cult of productivity. Later, the Reverend Franklin (John Atkinson) expounds on Moloch as the sun sets behind him, explaining to Stephen how the new gods of industry and institutions are perversions that have disfigured the message of the “revolutionary” Jesus. The Reverend speculates that the people may “revolt from the monolith and come back to the village,” noting that “pagan” means “of the village,” contrasting with what it means to be “of the city”—”bourgeois.”

The provisional nature of modernity is a key theme. Arne speaks of the urban behemoth swelling to a great city that will “[choke] the globe from pole to pole” but that will also “bear the seed of its own destruction.” We might imagine Hobbes’s Leviathan, bloated and turgid, decomposing back into the earth. Elsewhere, Stephen and his father discuss King Penda, the last pagan ruler of Britain. The Reverend reimagines the heretic as a transcendent symbol of resistance, wondering aloud what secrets he took with him when he fell. “The machine,” like the meaty bodies of its busy multitudes, is imagined as just one combination among an infinite number, an entirely temporary arrangement destined for the dirt.

Landscape is a focal point of the play but, unlike in our other examples, here serves as a vector of elemental truth rather than a source of corruption. Rudkin draws on the Gothic and Romantic traditions to conjure up an English countryside pregnant with ancient histories that lie unknown, hidden or forgotten. It was here, after all, in the 16th century, that the machine first emerged out of the fields and the fens and separated the peasantry from the land—the original trauma that encloses the margins of modern Western history. What lies beyond that temporal boundary is the vanishing realm of nightmare, of un-modernity, where yawns the black abyss of the unknown, the domain of animal and reigning wilderness. But, paradoxically, that abyss is essential to our nature—it’s where billions of lives were lived, where our minds and bodies were wrought and cultivated. Penda’s Fen considers the abyss for all its hidden potentials and reconfigures rupture as opportunity. The horror of recognizing the self in the other, or vice versa, is imagined as a route to emancipation.

In perhaps the most famous scene, Stephen awakes from a homoerotic dream to discover a demonic entity straddling him in his bed, which then takes the shape of the local milkman (Ron Smerczak). What haunts him is not his sexuality but his dedication to the authoritarian norms of middle-class Protestant England. As Arne prophecies in a later scene, the only way to purge ourselves of these demons and reach salvation is by way of “chaos” and “disobedience,” to summon our basest selves.

When we first find Stephen, he’s alone in his room, listening to his favorite composer Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and reflecting on the moment when the protagonist meets God. Stephen is isolated from the world, only able to theorize obliquely about transcendent experiences. By contrast, the final sequence sees him meet his maker on an open hillside—not God, per se, but King Penda himself, the half-real spirit of “ungovernableness,” who tells him to go forth and “be strange.”

Much like its predecessors, the play makes no attempt at an authentic depiction of pre-Christian spirituality—we have no idea what the titular King Penda might have believed, what his traditions were, what cosmologies were lost when he was defeated all those years ago. But this is precisely the point. The last pagan king functions as an empty vector of “possibilities” and “unknown elements,” much like Stephen himself. Despite being an apparition of a long-dead historical figure, King Penda represents a haunting from the future, that dark domain of the beyond with which we are in contact every moment of our lives, full of unthinkable potential and inherent strangeness.

Penda’s Fen advances itself as the spiritual resolution to the folk horror cycle, a psychic exorcism of the demons that haunted the ‘70s. Rudkin’s play summons the future from the past, reconstituting the volatility of its day as a rite of passage into a new world. Horror in this sense denotes contact with new terrain, communion between the self and the beyond. To be comfortable is to live in fear of the strange invasions that confront us at every moment and in every thought and experience—to flee from ourselves. In a time when people want change without having to confront the proverbial milkman, the play enjoys continued relevance long after its first life.

Both Robin Redbreast and Penda’s Fen were aired only once more on British television, in 1971 and 1990 respectively, lending these tales the ephemeral quality of weird dreams dreamt long ago—and raising the question of why they’ve now returned to haunt us. The villagers never came to reclaim the robin in the end, yet still we see their shapes in the window and hear strange knocks at the door. Will we ever face up to the horrors that guard the margins of our world? Or are we, like Norah Palmer, doomed to retreat further and further into the city, to delay the inevitable day when the outside closes in? In the closing scene of Rudkin’s play, King Penda prophesies exile as the sun sets behind him: “Night is falling; your land and mine goes down into a darkness now… but the flame still flickers in the fen.” The future promised by that strange flame lies lost somewhere in that expanse of night. Only by embracing the dark might we find it again.

Mark Sheridan is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. He recently graduated from Dublin City University.

We are now at the part of my hand-made maps of the world where I leave the dungeons (Basic) and wildernesses (Expert) that I knew so well.   I am now in an area of half-rumored tales and speculations.  Stories from other travelers, with tales that are both familiar and yet foreign to me.

Join me on my exploration of the new worlds of the D&D Companion Set.  But a warning, here there be Dragons!

D&D Companion Set (1984)

I don't think it is too much to say that the Companion Set contains some of the most interesting changes and updates to the D&D than any other product TSR had published to date.  I will talk more about these in the review, but first a look back.

I had eagerly awaited the Companion set for D&D ever since I got my Expert Set.  That is, by B/X Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert Set.

The Companion Set, as promised by the Expert Set rules, mentions that characters will now go to 36th level and there will be a way to cure undead level drain!  Such promises. Such hope!

D&D Cook Expert Set, page X8
Though it was not to be and the B/X line stopped there, only to be "rebooted" in 1983 with the BECMI line, though we were not calling it that back then.

By the time the Companion did come out I had moved on to AD&D. I no longer had any interest in the Companion rules having discovered the world could also have Assassins, half-orcs, and 9 alignments.

I did manage to read it once.  I was in college and it was at Castle Perilous Games in Carbondale. Of course, at the time AD&D 2nd Ed was the new hotness and I had no desire to look backward.  What I saw though at the time did not impress me.  I think the entire Mentzer set at the time (AT THE TIME mind you) made me think of it as D&D for little kids (now I see it differently).

Looking back now I see I made a BIG MISTAKE.
Well...maybe.  I mean I would not have traded my AD&D time for anything, but I do wish I had given the BECMI rules more of a chance.

Now I can fix that.

Today I am going to cover the BECMI Companion Rules.  I am going to cover both the DriveThruRPG PDFs and my recently acquired box set.


The Companion Set follows the rules as presented in the BECMI Basic and Expert books. But unlike those books, the Companion Rules sets off into uncharted directions and gives us some new material.

While the claim can be made that Frank Mentzer only edited and organized the Basic and Expert rules based on previous editions, the Companion set is all his.  While there may be some influences from earlier editions such as Greyhawk (with it's 22nd level cap [wizards] and some monsters) and AD&D (some monsters and the multiverse) this really feels new.

Companion Player's Book 1
The player's book is 32 pages with color covers and black & white interiors. Art by Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
Opening this book we get a preface with a dedication to Brian Blume. A nice touch and yeah he is often forgotten in the tale of D&D's earliest years.  The preface also firmly situates us in time. We 10 years out from when D&D was first published. The design goals of this book, and consequently this series, have never been more firmly stated.  This is an introduction to the D&D game and designed to be fun, playable, and true to the spirit of D&D.  It certainly feels like this is the successor to the Original D&D game; maybe more so than AD&D.
One page in and we are off to a great start.

The title and table of contents page tell us that this game is now "by" Frank Mentzer, based on D&D by Gygax and Arneson.  As we move into the book proper we get a feel for the "changing game."  Characters are more powerful and once difficult threats are no more than a nuisance or exercise.  The characters are ready to take their place among the rulers of the world.  This makes explicit something I always felt AD&D only played lip service to.

We get some new weapons that have different sorts of effects like knocking out an opponent or entangling them. We also get some unarmed combat rules.    Now, these feel they really should have been added to the Basic or Expert rule sets. Maybe they were but were cut for space or time.

Up next is Stronghold management from the point of view of the player characters.  Again here D&D continues its unwritten objective of being educational as well as fun.  More on this in the DM's book.

Character Classes
Finally, about 11 pages in we get to the Character updates.  Here all the human character classes get tables that go to level 25; again maybe a nod to Greyhawk's level 20-22 caps, and caps of 7th level spells (clerics) and 9th level spell (magic-users).  Clerics get more spells and spell levels.  The big upgrade comes in the form of their expanded undead turning table.  Clerics up to 25th level and monsters up to Liches and Special.  This mimics the AD&D Clerics table; I'd have to look at them side by side to see and differences.  One difference that comes up right away is the increase in undead monsters.  There are phantoms, haunts, spirits, and nightshades.  Nightshades, Liches, and Special will be detailed in the Master Set.

Something that is big pops up in the cleric listing.  A Neutral cleric of level 9 or higher may choose to become a Druid! Druids only resemble their AD&D counterparts in superficial ways.  They have similar spells, but the BECMI Druid cannot change shape.  It is an interesting implementation of the class and one I'll discuss more in a bit.

Arguably it is fighters that get the biggest boost in the Companion Set.  They gain the ability to have multiple attacks per round now and other combat maneuvers such as smashing, pairing and disarming. This is a big deal since they got so little in the Expert set. Fighters can also "specialize" into three paths depending on alignment.  There are Knights, Paladins, and Avengers.  Each type gives the fighter something a little extra.  Paladins are not very far off from their AD&D counterparts and Avengers are as close to an Anti-Paladin as D&D will get until we get to the Blackguards.

Conversely, Magic-users do not get as much save from greater spells. We do get the restriction that any spell maxes out 20dX damage.

Thieves can now become Guildmasters or Rogues.  A name that will come up more and more with future editions of D&D.

BECMI "Prestige Classes?"
The Druid, Knight, Avenger, Paladin, and to a lesser degree the Magist and Rogues represent what could arguably be called the first Prestige Classes to D&D.  Their inclusion predates the publication of the Theif-Acrobat in the AD&D Unearthed Arcana.
Prestige Classes are classes that one can take after meeting certain requirements in other "base" classes in D&D 3.x and Pathfinder. Often at 10th level, but can occur anytime the character meets the requirements.  This concept is later carried on into D&D 4 with their "Paragon Paths" (chosen at 11th level) and even into D&D 5 with their subclasses (chosen at 2nd level).
The BECMI Avenger and Paladin are the best examples of these working just like the Prestige Classes will in 15 more years.   This is interesting since it also means other classes can be added to the basic 4 core ones using the same system.  An easy example is the Theif-Acrobat from UA or even the Ranger from AD&D.  Though here the problem lies in the alignment system.  Rangers are supposed to be "good" for example.

Demi-Humans
Demi-humans may not advance any more in level, but they are not idle.  This is also the area of the Companion Set that I most often go wrong.  Each demi-human race has a Clan Relic and some demi-humans could be in charge of these clan relics, making them very powerful. There are also clan rulers and they are also detailed.  What does all that mean?  It means there is a good in-game reason why demi-humans do not advance in levels anymore.  They are much more dedicated to their clans than humans. So after a time it is expected that they will return home to take up their responsibilities to the clan.


That is not to say that these characters do not advance anymore.  Each demi-human race can still gain "Attack Ranks" as if they are still leveling up.  They don't gain any more HP, but they can attack as if they are higher-level fighters.  They also gain some of the fighter's combat options. Each class gets 11 such rank-levels.   It seems to split some hairs on "no more levels" but whatever.

We end with a map of the expanding Known World.  This is the continent of Brun of Mystara, but we don't know that yet.  But I will discuss that later this week.

This book is a lot more than I expected it to be and that is a good thing.

Companion DM's Book 2
The DM's book is 64 pages with color covers and black & white interiors. Art by Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
There is a lot to this book.  First, we get to some General Guidelines that cover the higher levels of play and planning adventures accordingly. There is sadly not a lot here.
We follow up with Part 2: The Fantasy World.  This continues some of the discussion of stronghold management and dominion management as well.  Now here is quite a bit of good information on what happens, or could happen, in a dominion. 
This section also includes the hidden secret of the D&D BECMI series.  The War Machine Mass Combat system.

War Machine
Around the same time TSR was also developing the BattleSystem Mass Combat system.  The two are largely incompatible with each other.  I always thought it was odd that two systems that do essentially the same things were created and incompatible with each other.   Later I learned that D&D BECMI lived in what we like to call a "walled garden" in the business.  It was out there doing it's own thing while the "real business" of AD&D was going on.  The problem was that D&D Basic was outselling AD&D at this point.  This was not the first time that TSR would woefully misunderstand their customers and sadly not the last time either.
War Machine has an elegance about it when compared to BattleSystem.  I am not saying it is simple, but the work involved is not difficult and I am happy to say it looks like it will work with any edition of D&D.

The Multiverse 
A big part of any D&D experience is the Multiverse.  This section allows the DMs and Players to dip their toes into the wider Multiverse which includes the Ethereal Plane and the Elemental Planes.


Space is also given to the discussion on aging, damage to magic items, demi-human crafts, poison, and more. We also get all of our character tables.

Monsters
About halfway through the book, we get to the section of monsters.  A lot of familiar AD&D faces are now here, though a bit of digging will show that many of these are also from OD&D up to the Greyhawk supplement.  Most notable are the beholder, larger dragons, druids (as a monster), and many elemental types. Monsters are split into Prime Plane and Other Planes. 
Among the monsters featured are the aforementioned Beholder, larger Dragons, and bunches of new Undead like haunts, druj, ghosts and more.  A few that caught my attention are the Gargantua (gigantic monsters) and Malfera.  The Malfera REALLY caught my attention since they are from the "Dimension of Nightmares."  More fodder for my Mystara-Ravenloft connection.
Monsters from the Other Planes focus on the Elemental planes.

Treasure
Lots of new treasure and magic items.

Adventures
There are three short adventure or adventure hooks for companion level characters.

All in all the Companion Set is full and had many things I did not think it had given my very casual relationship to it over the years.  Reading it now and in-depth for the very first time I see there is a lot I could have used in my games back then.

Also reading this gives me a lot of ideas for more Basic/BECMI sorts of campaigns and plans for classes.

I interrupt BECMI Week to give you something decidedly B/X.

It took a bit, but now you can get The Warlock for Old-School Essentials in print, both in hard-cover and soft-cover!


I am very pleased with how they came out and they look fantastic.




The contents of both versions are the same, so no need to worry about which one to get.


They look great with the Old-School Essentials books.


The hard-cover even fits into your OSE box!


It is 100% compatible with my Swords & Wizardry Warlock book.  Combine them for even more warlock powers, pacts and spells.


Or combine it with my Craft of the Wise Witch Book for Old-School Essentials for even more spells.


It is the latest, but not yet the last, of the books in my Basic-Era Games line of Witchcraft traditions.

Back to BECMI posts later today.

This week I am going to cover the Companion series and what that meant to me before it came out when it came out and now.

Today we have nearly unfettered access to RPG material.  One of the things I did not have access too was the original AC9 D&D Creature Catalogue.  My DM though in 1986 did.  One of the creatures I liked was the Gray Philosopher. I really liked undead monsters for my game, so I went home after seeing this and wrote my own version for my AD&D game.  Liches would not appear in D&D until the Master Set, which I never saw till much later, but they were a staple of AD&D.

Later I expanded on it for AD&D 2nd Ed and called it an "Occult Lich."  Though I was never 100% happy with it.

This creature is based on some ideas I had for the "Occult Lich" and something I was calling the "Accidental Lich."

This lich was/is my "clerical" version of the "magic-user" lich.
The name is also a nod to the "Philosopher's Stone."


Lich, Philosopher
Armor Class: 0
Hit Dice: 10-14*
Move: nil
Attacks: nil
Damage: nil
No. Appearing: 1 (1)
Save As: Cleric 10-14
Morale: 12
Treasure Type: V x2 + Special
Alignment: Chaotic
XP Value:
  10 HD: 1,600
  11-12 HD: 1,900
  13-14 HD: 2,300

The Philosopher Lich is most often created when an evil cleric is pondering some evil plan or a philosophical bit of occult knowledge that they extend beyond death.
The Philosopher Lich will often be found seated, typically in a pose of deep contemplation.  They appear as do other liches; skeletal wearing robes common to their station in life and with eyes that glow of a deep and profound evil intelligence. It is this malevolent glow that keeps them from confused with normal skeletons or an undead one.
Philosopher Liches were once great clerics dedicated to foul beings beyond the understanding of humans.  Their evil thoughts pre-occupy their very existence. They do not move and rarely speak.
They are guarded by their evil thoughts made manifest known as notions.
If all the notions are defeated the Philosopher Lich can attack with spells it knew as a high-level evil cleric.  They will also have 2-5 (1d4+1) magic items common to high-level clerics with the exception of arms and armor. This is in addition to double the type V.
Philosopher Liches are turned as Liches, but they cannot be turned as long as their Notions are still active.

Notions
Armor Class: 3
Hit Dice: 4**
Move: 90' (30')
   Flying: 240' (60')
Attacks: 1
Damage: 2-5 (1d4+1) + Special (Intelligence Drain)
No. Appearing: Same as HD of Philosopher Lich
Save As: Cleric 4
Morale: 12
Treasure Type: Nil
Alignment: Chaotic
XP Value: 175

Notions are the manifestations of the evil thoughts of the Philosopher Lich.  The notions appear as wraith-like horrific versions of the Lich as he or she appeared in life, though twisted.  Each notion is a reflection of the horrible thought the Lich has.  So thoughts of murder manifest as a bloody looking notion, greedy notions are covered in chains, gluttonous notions are fat, and so on.
The notions attack with a single touch that feels like an electric shock or cold chill, depending on the notion, that does 2-5 hp of damage.  The victim attacked must also make a Saving Throw vs. Death or lose 1 point of Intelligence.  The notions "feed" on this mental energy and give it to the Philosopher Lich.
Victims restore their Intelligence score at a rate of 1 per week.

Notions can be turned as Spectres.

I dunno about you but I think that’s a pretty darn ugly cover. Apologies to the artist.

The best part of the magazine is a very interesting article by Gygax about the Planes of existence. Although the planes have been mentioned in spells and items in the supplements, this is the first time the concept has been articulated. I found it fascinating to hear the reasoning for why some creatures can only be harmed by magic weapons – because they exist across 2 or more of the planes. And the +1 sword (or other magical item) also exists across the prime and another plane. So it can damage the monster in the other plane. As far as I know, this idea was never developed further. Funnily enough he mentions problems with the concept and says he probably won’t use it. There’s more info about the development of the planes here : http://ontologicalgeek.com/walking-the-planes-2-a-history-of-the-planes-in-dungeons-dragons/

There’s a very good, logical article about how to design a town for your campaign.

Monster & Treasure Assortment Set One gets a mention in the ad for The Dungeon Hobby Shop.

Not D&D related – there’s an interesting sneak preview of Gamma World, which presents the alt-history leading up to the game’s milieu. I mention this oddity, because at the same time, the new Basic D&D set was released in the same month as this magazine and it gets exactly zero mention!

Another one of those realism articles – tables to make your gems more realistic, with attributes like carats and types of stone.

By comparison there’s a funny small article by Brian Blume about ‘rolling’ up your 6 abilities in a more realistic way – eg Wisdom = 20 minus the number of hours you played/prepared D&D last week.

Feature creature : this time just a drawing by Erol Otus and a competition to name and describe it.

Next up – Holmes Basic – I’m excited!

We are going into Companion Week so let's get a character above 15th level.  Who better than the poster boy for Chaotic Avengers, Warduke.

But since I am playing 5e this weekend, here are his stats for 5e.



H/T to Jason Vey for providing these stats.

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: The World of Necronomicon

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Marek Golonka
Setting: Any 

Product: Campaign set-up
What You Get: 5.82 MB twelve-page, full-colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes what you read sets you apart. 
Plot Hook: What if encounters with the strange confirmed what you read in The Necronomicon rather than The Necronomicon confirming what you encountered?
Plot Development: Like Lovecraft’s protagonists, investigators know the content of the forbidden The Necronomicon from the start, their studies altering their perception of reality to be able to see what the blasphemous tome alludes to, emphasising its dread influence, and bringing Lovecraftian investigative roleplay closer to Lovecraft’s narrative.
Plot Support: Discussions of Investigator back stories, locations of The Necronomicons, first revelations, adventure seeds, and some mistranslations.

Pros
# Sixth release in English for the ‘Zgrozy’ line
# Works in any period which has The Necronomicon 
# The horror comes pre-loaded
# Closer to Lovecraft’s narrative structure
# Player knowledge becomes investigator knowledge?
# Ties into The Necronomicon description in the Keeper Rulebook
# For both player and Keeper
# Good roleplaying potential# Prequel potential?
# Makes the Investigators themselves weird and ‘special’
# Possible Investigator organisation?

Cons# Sets players and Investigators up with too much information?
# Needs a better edit
# No specific example of it being used with a published scenario
# Increases the Keeper’s workload at the table

Conclusion
# Interesting alternative campaign framework
# Possible Investigator organisation

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles—and so on, as the anniversaries come up. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

—oOo—

Over the years, Dungeons & Dragons has returned again and again to face its tallest foe—the giants! Most recently Wizards of the Coast pitted adventurers against them in 2016’s Storm King’s Thunder, the sixth campaign for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but their first appearance was in a trilogy of scenarios which began with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and continued with G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. The three would subsequently be collected as G1-2-3 Against the Giants, which itself would form the first three parts of the campaign that would be collected in 1986 as GDQ1–7 Queen of the Spiders. In 1999, these three modules would be reprinted as part of the Dungeons & Dragons Silver Anniversary Collector’s Edition boxed set and more properly revisited in Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff. It would be followed in 2009 by Revenge of the Giants, the first ‘mega-adventure’ for Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition, and then of course, in 2016 with Wizards of the Coast’s Storm King’s Thunder. For anyone interested in reading or running the series for themselves, G1-3 Against the Giants is available as a surprisingly inexpensive reprint.
Much of this history as well as critical response to both the individual dungeons and the collected G1-2-3 Against the Giants is detailed on Wikipedia. This is worth taking the time to read, so Reviews from R’lyeh recommends doing so before returning to this series of reviews. The ‘Giants Review’ series began with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and continues with G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.
G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl is a direct sequel to G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. In G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, the Player Characters were directed to investigate the recent attacks upon the  lands of the humans—nominally in the World of Greyhawk—by attacks by giants of various types. Against this unheard of occurrence the rulers of these lands hired the Player Characters to deal a lesson to the Hill Giants. In the course of the adventure, the party carried out a strike—and ‘strike’ is the right term—on the Hill Giant steading, because G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is nothing more than a commando raid upon a ‘military’ base. As well as discovering the presence of other giants at a feast held in their honour, what the Player Characters also discover is the scenario’s singular link to G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. It is both figuratively and actually a link, capable of transporting the party to the Glacial Rift of said second scenario. It is at this point that G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl begins.
Whether they have arrived via the device found at the end of G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief or via a map if coming to the adventure separate from the campaign, they find themselves standing at a rift which descends into a glacier. Beyond lies what is almost a mini-world of its own, an arctic, icy-fog-bound cavern round which an icy ledge runs off of which are openings after openings to smaller caverns. Of course, these caverns—nearly all of them ‘ice’ caverns—are still large, many of them either the workplace or quarters of, well, Frost Giants. So the Player Characters will encounter ice cavern after ice cave, seemingly many of them full of Frost Giants ready to grab rocks and lumps of ice and throw them at the intruding Player Characters. These are not the only occupants of the cavern complex. The Frost Giants are being visited by Hill Giants, Stone Giants, and Fire Giants as well as Ogre Magi. They also have a variety of servants, such as Ogres and Yetis, whilst in the lower level, there is a large, ancient White Dragon and his mate, which infamously is kept behind a boulder blocking a ten-foot wide tunnel! This is the ‘Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl’, home to a tribe of Frost Giants, who like Hill Giants, have been conducting raids upon the lands of the Humans.
The ‘Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl’ consists of just two levels, just like the Steading of the Hill Giant chief before it. The first level is funnel-like, initially directing the progress of the Player Characters down one side of the enormous central cavern and into the caverns and caves leading off, and perhaps into the depths of the cavern below. Eventually the Player Characters will be funneled into the second, lower level beyond the first. This is more linear in nature, taking the Player Characters into the quarters of tribe’s nobility as well as those of ‘Grugnur’, the Frost Giant Jarl himself—plus his “lady”, Grugni. Here the Player Characters will also encounter many of Jarl’s guests, mostly giants of other species, their presence building on the hints suggested at the banquet in the fortress of Hill Giant chief in G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief to suggest a wider conspiracy. As with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, the Player Characters by the end of G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl will find clues and links that will point them towards or get them to King Snurre’s hall, as detailed in G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King.
G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl packs a lot of information and play into its eight pages—well, six pages really given that the equivalent of one page is devoted to a single illustration. Yet there is very much a sense of it being a second album, the difficult middle part of a trilogy, brilliant in parts, but for the most part, imperfect. On the plus side, there is a sense of scale and grandeur to the glacial rift. Not only is the glacial rift up a mountain, but is itself cavernous, with an enormous central cave off which high passages and caves lead, marking it all home to the all-too tall Frost Giants and others. There is also a rich atmosphere to the scenario, both meteorologically and tonally. Ice and snow is everywhere, light being chillingly cast through fog and snow, reflecting the light from the Player Characters’ torches, lanterns, and magic in a shimmering glow. Constant wind blows throughout, threatening to whip the Player Characters from the icy ledges and preventing them from using spells like Fly and Levitate. There is always an exploratory aspect to dungeon delving, but in G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl this is made Himalayan or Antarctic in nature, making the scenario a test of the Player Characters’ physical endurance as much a test of their logistical use of magic and spells.
In terms of tone, the scenario is written with the sense of Gygaxian naturalism as G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief—all of the monsters fit the environment (even the Remorhaz, which although capable of producing heat, is actually a Polar Worm) and the caves are rich with small details that add flavour and verisimilitude to the environment. Cave larders full of dead bodies hung as frozen food, great carvings worked into cavern walls depicting great battles, and the wealth of detail describing the richness of Grugnur’s quarters. There are also interesting treasures for the Player Characters to find, such as a +2 Giant Slayer bastard sword, a Ring of Wishes, and a Box of Holding. Curiously, the +2 Giant Slayer sword is given an Alignment, by default, Lawful Good, but lacks the Intelligence and Ego that such special swords would have in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The difference being explained by the fact that G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, like G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King before and after it, were written during the earliest days of the development of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The Ring of Wishes of course, gives the Player Characters an incredibly powerful magical item, whilst the Box of Holding seems overly presented, a trick box whose operation is given in precise details.
However, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl is not without its problems. These stem, just as with G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, from its age and it being originally designed as a tournament adventure run at a convention. In this case, as part of the Origins Tournament in 1978. This explains its brevity and its emphasis on combat. Whilst there is a much greater exploratory aspect to the play through of G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl than there is to G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, the two share a similar lack of roleplaying opportunities for either the Dungeon Master or her players. These consist of a Storm Giantess who might enter an alliance with the Player Characters and four Human captives currently held ready for Frost Giant cooking pot. None of these NPCs are detailed and it is left up to the Dungeon Master to develop them herself, though any of the Humans could be developed into potential replacement Player Characters.
Another issue is the power level of the scenario. This is shown in the potency of the magical items to be found in the scenario, such as the Ring of Wishes and the +2 Giant Slayer bastard sword. It is also shown in the toughness of the opponents that the Player Characters will face—the numerous Frost Giants, their allies, and their ‘pets’, the White Dragons. It is recommended that the minimum Level of the Player Characters should be Sixth or Seventh, but ideally the optimum party should consist of nine characters who should average Ninth Level and be equipped with several magic items each. Even with Player Characters of such lofty Levels, there is a high chance that they will wander into the wrong section and get caught between two or more groups of the Frost Giants on guard and driven back under a hail of thrown rocks and chunks of ice. That said, the scenario does provide a safe point, a cave outside of the Glacial Rift to which the Player Characters can retreat and heal, rest up, and regain their spells. Of course, if the Player Characters are forced to retreat, the Frost Giants will undoubtedly be on their guard, even more prepared to withstand further invaders.
Of course, one stand-up fight after one stand-up is not necessarily how a playthrough of G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl will proceed. The Player Characters might work their way in so far, strike or be rebuffed, then retreat to the cave refuge outside of the Glacial Rift, and then reenter to attack again and again, until such times as they have made their way to its end. Alternatively, a particularly stealthy and careful party of Player Characters could actually make its way as far as the dungeon’s second level before encountering any meaningful opposition. 
Physically, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl is a slim booklet, just eight pages with the loose card cover on the inside of which are the maps of the Jarl’s holdings. The booklet is cramped, but E. Gary Gygax again packs in a lot of detail. There are just a few illustrations and they do vary in quality. The maps though, are done in a light blue on white, so they do not leap out as being very clear or easy to read. However, the layout and the presentation of individual encounters is often, Gygax often focusing on elements which interest him rather than are of immediate use to the Game Master running the module. Of course, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl was one of the first adventure modules to be published and forty years on, the standard of information presentation and handling has much improved.
—oOo—
G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl was published at a time when there were few magazines in which they could be reviewed. In many cases, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl would be reviewed when it was published in the collected G1-2-3 Against the Giants in 1981. For example, this is the version that Anders Swenson reviewed in Different Worlds Issue 20 (March 1982). He wrote, “First of all, the standards for adventure length have expanded considerably, so that a single product now contains the material previously considered adequate for three booklets. The text has problems which the later books have avoided - the individual have no consistent format, and important monsters can be literally lost in the middle of a paragraph between descriptions of loot and room contents. As noted, the flaw of making the scale of the maps much too small is made again by the publisher, along with the bad habit of letting the lower levels degenerate into a random monster mix.” He concluded though, “However, this series of adventures has many strong points which outweigh the flaws noted above. First is the theme of a plot which must be followed step by step back to its source. Second is the attempt at a realistic treatment of the giants' living places - except for the problems I have already mentioned, the plans for the various giant forts are realistic and reasonable. Finally, the text is well-written and pleasing to read.”
White Dwarf was the exception and managed to review the trilogy of G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King together in Open Box in White Dwarf Issue No. 9. However, this did not mean that they were reviewing independently of each other, the late Don Turnbull concluding, “In summary, there are three D&D scenarios which have been very carefully planned in considerable detail, both individually and collectively; they have been presented in exemplary fashion and are fit to grace the collection of the most discerning. They require skill in play (which is right) but also require a party of high-level characters, and my one regret is that they were not aimed at parties more likely to be readily available to players (though, in fairness, you can't expect a weak party to take on gangs of Giants). No DM should be without them, for even if he never gets a chance to run them, they are a source of much excellent design advice.”
—oOo—
Thematically, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl is the fitting next step in the Giants trilogy, but it feels too much like the connecting scenario between G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. Whilst there is a fantastic atmosphere to G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, its play emphasises combat over either roleplaying or plot. Indeed, there is very little plot to the scenario—it amounts to ‘start at the entrance and make your way to the exit’—and there are very few clues for the Player Characters to find and learn more about the greater conspiracy, about whomever is actually directing the Giants’ attacks on the lands of the Humans. Another issue  is that despite the naturalism of the design to G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, it feels static, for unlike G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief where there was a feast going on, there is nothing happening like that in G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.
Lastly G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl is a dungeon crawl and a challenging one. However, it needs greater input upon the part of the Dungeon Master to be made more interesting than it really is. 
—oOo—
It should be noted that Wizards of the Coast collected and published G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King as part of Tales from the Yawning Portal for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It is a pity that Goodman Games would not have a chance to revisit, develop, and update the series as it did for B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 Keep on the Borderlands with Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into the Borderlands. Certainly there is some archival material in the early issues of Dragon magazine, such as the examination of these modules as tournament adventures in Dragon 19. In the meantime, the next review in the series will be of G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King.

As its title suggests, The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart, is a ‘jump-start’—or quick-start’—for Exalted Third Edition, the high fantasy anime-inspired roleplaying game published by Onyx Path Publishing. It is set in a forgotten age when the world lay flat atop a sea of chaos, when the elements were sharply defined culturally and geographically. The gods made war upon the monsters that forged this world and give their human champions the gift of Exaltation, their divine power which granted them amazing gifts and fortitude. Led by the Solar Exalted, mankind would defeat the monsters and inaugurate the First Age of Man, but the Dragon-Blooded Exalted grew jealous, threw down the realm that the Solar Exalted had built, slew them one-by-one, and locked away their powers of Solar Exaltation. The Dragon-Blooded empire has ruled over a Second Age—an age of sorrows, warfare, and strife—for centuries. Now as lesser nations chafe at the Dragon-Blooded empire’s grip and the Dragon-Blooded empire has been wounded by the less of its immortal empress, Solar Exaltation has returned from its long banishment and death, its champions unleashing the powers of the Unconquered Sun upon the world anew. Will they bring light to the world or set it alight?

In The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart, five Solar Exalted will follow their dreams into mystery from ages past. It provides five pre-generated Solar Exalted player characters, an explanation of the core rules for Exalted Third Edition, and ‘The Tomb of Dreams’, a short scenario. It is designed to introduce the Game Master and her players to both the setting and mechanics, as well as proving a starting point for an ongoing Exalted Third Edition campaign using the full rules. Besides The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart, the Game Master and her players will need between ten and fifteen ten-sided dice—preferably per player, and copies of the character sheets and their explanation.

In Exalted Third Edition, a character or ‘Exalted’, ise defined by various traits. These include nine attributes—Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance, Perception, Intelligence, and Wits; Skills such as Archery or Socialise; Merits such as wealth and political power, and traits of a singular nature; Willpower—representing mental fortitude as well as being spent for various things; Essence—magical potency, consisting of personal and peripheral motes which fuel mystical powers and can be committed to power ongoing effects; and Limit and Limit Trigger, representing the curse twisting an Exalted’s soul, levied when they kill the enemies of the gods. He will have Intimacies, what be believes and cares about, used in social interaction. Health and Defence cover static values such as Parry, Evasion, Defense, Resolve, and Guile. Now some of these elements are not used in The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart. These include the Merits, Limit and Limit Trigger, Experience, amongst others. 

Mechanically, a player will be rolling a pool of ten-sided dice, typically formed by adding an Attribute and a Skill together—each being rated between one and five. Each die result of seven or more counts as a success with ‘double tens’, or rolls of ten, counting as double. A character may need to beat a given Difficulty, again rated between one and five. One notable way of increasing the number of dice a character rolls is a stunt, earned by a player giving an evocative description of what his character is going to do. Stunts range in value from one to three, and can simply add dice to a pool, raise a Static value, or grant an automatic success. The point of stunts is to make situations and their outcome exciting and grant players a greater degree of narrative control.

The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart focuses on three aspects of the Exalted Third Edition rules—combat, battle groups, and social influence. Combat can be divided into two types of attacks which are rolled against the opponent’s Defence static value. These are ‘Withering Attacks’ which seize the flow of battle and steal an opponent’s initiative and enable to the attacker to use it as his own. Decisive attacks inflict damage directly on the opponents, and are typically used after a few Withering attacks have been made. An opponent reduced to an Initiative of zero is forced into Initiative Crash and is limited in his actions. The combat rules also cover rushing into a fight, withdrawing, and taking cover, as well as aiming, making flurry attacks, full defence, and more. Flurry attacks enable a character to act more than once in a round. There is a sense of escalation to combat, of attacks and high action going back and forth between the opponents, until one side or another manages to make enough Withering attacks to follow them up with a Decisive attack.

Battle Groups are designed to handle anything from a squad or a band to a mob or a formation. They have their own values—Size, Drill (training), Might (supernatural power, if any), and Magnitude (health). A Battle Group inflicts Withering attacks, does not gain the benefits of ‘Double Tens’, and only gets one attack per round. Essentially, the rules for Battle Groups treat them as Mooks, making them dangerous, but not as dangerous or powerful as the NPCs who lead them and whom the Exalted player characters are likely to face on the battlefield. The rules for Social Influence work with the Intimacies which are divided between Ties, attachments to people, places, and organisations, and Principles, beliefs and ideals. For example, ‘My Mentor (Grudging Respect)’ or ‘I am the greatest swordsman who ever lived.’ They can be used increase a target’s Resolve against efforts to influence him, change a target’s feelings and beliefs, and threaten, inspire, and more. 

Lastly, an Exalted can tap into the real power of Creation, which expresses through his Anima Banner. This exhibits first in the caste mark on his forehead and then grows into raging glow around him, becoming more and more as an Exalted uses motes of the Essence that underlies all of creation—either his Personal Essence or Peripheral Essence drawn from around him. These motes are used to fuel various Charms and Spells, for example, ‘Excellent Strike’ ensures an automatic success and lets a player reroll any ones, which requires three motes, whilst ‘Death of Obsidian Butterflies’ costs fifteen sorcerous motes and one Willpower to a create a torrent of razor-edged black butterflies which can inflict a Decisive attack!

The five pre-generated Exalted all come with character sheets and a couple of pages of description and explanation, which includes an illustration and some background. They include Volfer, a pit-fighter; Karal Fire Orchid, a retired general who once served the Dragon-Blooded; Iay Selak-Amu, a witch from the Windward Isle; Faka Kun, a desert pygmy acrobat-thief; and Mirror Flag, a revolutionary actor. They are a reasonable mix, though they do lack personal motivations as to their involvement in the scenario.

‘The Tomb of Dreams’ scenario in The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart begins with the player characters arriving on a strange island, seemingly walking out of the ocean along a reef. They are drawn here by dreams of their legacy of their recent Solar Exaltation, and must find their way between the ongoing, ancient struggle between a god, an elemental, and a demon. Their ultimate goal is to locate a cache of ancient weapons and more, but to do that, they will need to determine the motives of the three antagonists. This is key to uncovering quite what is going on the island, but the likelihood is that they will need to enter into a few battles too. The adventure is not quite linear, a couple of options being given which vary according to which of the NPCs the Exalted meet first. Overall, this is a decent scenario which hints at the long history before the Third Age, though it could have done with stronger hooks for the given player character Exalted.

Physically, The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart is well presented and well written. The artwork is good, some of it excellent, though some of it is slightly cartoony. The four characters are given some fantastic abilities to bring to the game and often the battlefield, both high action and high fantasy.

What The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart is not, is a quick-start. Although it drops various elements of the full Exalted Third Edition, there is still a complexity to the mechanics of the roleplaying game which requires a careful read-through upon the part of the Storyteller. In fact, the Storyteller would be advised to sit down and run an example of the various mechanics herself prior to bringing it to the table for her players. Otherwise, The Tomb of Dreams An Exalted Third Edition Jumpstart is a serviceable introduction to Exalted Third Edition, which though requires a bit of preparation, enables the Game Master to bring anime style high action, high fantasy to her gaming table.

Well...This was supposed to be posted last night, but I guess I forgot to set it up right.

So continuing with the music of the time when the BECMI sets were new here is some music from 1984!

Today is my birthday!  For me back in Jr. High and beyond that meant playing D&D in the summer.
Well, I still get to do that with my kids, but this birthday I treated myself to something special.


Yes, it took me nearly 40 years, but I finally picked up the BECMI Companion Rules.

I have been going over the PDFs for my BECMI month and Companion week coming up on Monday. But let's be honest, nothing is better than a physical book.



The box was in rough shape, but the books inside are great.

I paid...well more than I care to admit...for these, but to get this vital part of my BECMI collection, to get it now AND for my birthday made it worth every penny.   The box damage is no big deal given all that.

I can say that at least my collection of BECMI rule books is now complete.


I do not have boxes for the Expert or Immortals set and that is fine really.  I am sure I can score an Expert set box somewhere.  Though my Masters and Immortals are both water-damaged so new ones would be nice.

Looking forward to my campaign that will use this system.  More on that later this month!

Almost twenty years after Games Workshop gave us Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, another British publisher gave us its take upon the infamous lawman of the future from the pages of the long-running Science Fiction comic, 2000AD. The year was 2002, publisher was Mongoose Publishing, and the rules employed the then system de jour—the d20 System. The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game (notice the subtle shift of the determiner to differentiate between the two games) was the first of several roleplaying games that the publisher would bring out based on the 2000AD licence, the other most notable one being Sláine, The Roleplaying Game of Celtic Fantasy. Like that roleplaying game, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game was published as a full colour hardback which contained the means to play in its milieu. This is the year 2124 and just like the earlier Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, this roleplaying game is set after a nuclear war which irradiated much of the Earth and forced most of the world’s population to live in a number of megalopolises—or supercities. Each is home to millions and millions living in great city-blocks, most of whom are unemployed and turn to hobbies, brand new trends or crazes, or even crime to keep themselves sane. The teeming masses are difficult to police and it takes a special dedicated individual, one who has trained for nearly all of his or her childhood to patrol and enforce the law in these great cities. These are the Judges, trained to be the best, armed with the best equipment, and ready to patrol the streets as combined policeman, judge, jury, and executioner. They enforce the law and do so fairly—and none no more fairly than Judge Dredd himself, a figure who is both authoritarian and an anti-hero, the most well known and feared Judge in Mega-City One on the eastern seaboard of what was once the United States of America. On a daily basis, Judge Dredd has to deal with litterers and jaywalkers, slowsters and sponts, robbers and murderers, smokers and boingers, illegal comic book dealers and gangster apes, and even Judge Death from a parallel earth. Over the years, the Judge Dredd comic has presented a carnival of crazy crimes and criminals, certainly more than enough to provide a rich, bonkers background, just as it did for Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game when it was published in 1985 and then again for The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game when it was published in 2002.

From the start, there is a hurdle to playing The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game. This is the fact that it uses the d20 System and so requires access to the Player’s Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition. In fact, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game is a Class and Level, Feat and Skill roleplaying game. Now in 2002 this was not unusual and mechanically, several roleplaying games of the period were essentially supplements for the Player’s Handbook with extra rules and a background. That said, anyone familiar with the d20 System would be able to pick up The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game, roll up a character, and get playing relatively quickly and without any great difficulties. 

As per Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, what the players can roleplay in The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game are Judges, the lawmen of the twenty-second century. Two are presented as standard character Classes—the Street Judge and the Psi-Judge—with the Med-Judge, the Tek-Judge, the SJS Judge, and Wally Squad Judge presented as Prestige Classes. There are two major changes in comparison to standard Player Characters. One is that both the Street Judge and the Psi-Judge start at Third Level rather than First Level, the other is that the Street Judge rolls a twelve-sided die for Hit Points, whilst the Psi-Judge rolls an eight-sided die. As Human characters, Judges, both Street Judge and Psi-Judge, receive a bonus Feat at character creation, and they are given more Feats as they acquire Levels. They also gain more skill points in a similar fashion. These can be the Feats standard to the Player’s Handbook or those particular to The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game.

Character creation is a straightforward process. A matter of rolling dice for attributes and Hit Points, then selecting skills and feats. These are a mix of standard skills and feats from the Player’s Handbook and those new in The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game.

Judge Muller
Third Level Street Judge
STR 14 (+2) DEX 09 (-1) CON 10 (+0)
INT 15 (+2) WIS 11 (+0) CHR 13 (+1)

Defence Value: 10
Hit Points: 24
Base Attack Bonus: +3 (Melee: +5/Ranged: +3)

Fort Save: +3 Ref Save:+3 Will Save: +3 

Skills: Balance 1, Bluff 1, Climb 3, Computer Use 4, Concentration 2, Drive 2, Intimidate 4, Jump 3, Knowledge (Law) 4, Listen 1, Medical 1, Pilot 1, Ride 1, Search 4, Sense Motive 3, Spot 2, Swim 3, Technical 4

Feats: Improved Interrogation, Lightning Reflexes, Luck of Grud

Weapon Proficiencies: All

The Psionics mechanics used for Psi-Judges can be best described as being a non-Vancian spell system. Instead of ‘fire-and-forget’ spells—or Psionic abilities—Psi-Judges possess Psi-Powers and receive several Power Points per day. This is in addition to Zero-Level Psi-Powers which a character can use several times per day. A Zero-Level Psi-Power like ‘Daze’ forces the target to lose his next action and costs a single Power Point to cost, whilst ‘Augury’, a Second-Level Psi-Power enables the Psionicist to cast his mind into the future to determine the outcome of an action. It costs two Power Points to cast. The Psionic Powers are a mix of new powers, such as ‘Psi-Lash’ or ‘Detect Thoughts’, and powers which feel familiar to spells from Dungeons & Dragons, like ‘Augury’ and ‘Clairvoyance’. The Psionicist also has access to Psionic Feats such as ‘Quicken Powers’, which enables a practitioner to manifest his psionic talents with a thought; normally it takes a Round to manifest a power. A psionic power can be saved against in a fashion similar to the spells cast by a Sorcerer.

Judge Garcia
Third Level Psi-Judge
STR 09 (-1) DEX 13 (+1) CON 12 (+1)
INT 16 (+2) WIS 15 (+2) CHR 18 (+4)

Defence Value: 11
Hit Points: 15
Base Attack Bonus: +3 (Melee: +4/Ranged: +2)

Fort Save: +4 Ref Save:+4 Will Save: +5

Power Points: 5
Psionic Talents: Zero-Level—Empathy, Missive; First-Level—Demoralise, Psychometry
Psionic Save: 14+Power Level

Skills: Balance 3, Bluff 6, Climb 0, Computer Use 3, Concentration 5, Drive 2, Intimidate 5, Jump 2, Knowledge (Law) 3, Listen 3, Medical 3, Pilot 2, Ride 2, Search 4, Sense Motive 4, Spot 4, Swim 0, Technical 3

Feats: Inner Strength, Psychoanalyst, Psychic Inquisitor

Weapon Proficiencies: All

Unfortunately, the mechanics for psionics are not very interesting, primarily because they are mapped onto the spell mechanics of the d20 System. This does not mean that they are unworkable, but rather that the results do not feel quite in keeping with that portrayed in the comic. The choice of Judges to play is also a potential issue, in that because Psi-Judge is a starting option, a team of Judges could conceivably consist of too many of them, their being weaker than Street Judges and less suited to street investigations. That said, an all Psi-Judge option is explored in the Game Master’s section. Another issue with the Judges as a play option is that a player cannot be a Med-Judge or a Tek-Judge right from the start rather than having to take a Prestige Class later on.

As well as presenting Judges as a play option, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game also offers another Class, not as a play option, but rather a campaign option. This is the Citizen Class, which notably lacks the training or abilities of the Street Judge or Psi-Judge, and starts at First Level rather than Third Level. To counter this, the Citizen is given a Prior-Life, such as Agitator, Cit-Def Soldier, Failed Cadet, Goon, Jetball Player, Juve, Mo-Pad Driver, Neo-Luddite, Punk, and more. The choices all neatly fit under the umbrella of the Citizen Class, whilst characters can aim for Prestige Classes such as the Assassin, the Bodyguard, the Citi-Def Officer, the Hunters Club Member, and more. This is potentially a fun idea and would make for a very different campaign to that of playing Judges.

Norma Trang
First Level Street Citizen
Prior Life: Agitator
STR 08 (-01) DEX 14 (+2) CON 08 (-1)
INT 12 (+1) WIS 12 (+1) CHR 16 (+3)

Defence Value: 12
Hit Points: 4
Base Attack Bonus: +0 (Melee: -1/Ranged: +2)

Fort Save: -1 Ref Save:+2 Will Save: +1 

Skills: Bluff 6, Craze (Compulsive Eating) 6, Intimidate 6, Knowledge (Law) 6, Sense Motive 5

Feats: Iron Will, Fool Birdie

Weapon Proficiencies: Grenades, Pistols, Melee Weapons

The two character types—the Judges and the Citizens—lend themselves to very different campaign types. A Judge focused campaign will be about patrolling the streets, investigating crimes and mysteries, and apprehending perpetrators, and so on. It does not matter which roleplaying game you are playing based upon the ‘Judge Dredd’ comic strip, this is the default option. The option to play Citizens enables a campaign to become involved in Mega-City One daily life, for the Player Characters to get involved in and enjoy the rash Crazes which sweep the megalopolis, and then to go get involved in and commit crime! Initially though, this has to be on a small scale, to not come to the attention of any Judge, at least until they have acquired a few Levels, given the fact that even a basic Judge will be at least Third Level.

Another reason that Citizen characters will be at a disadvantage when facing any Judge is that the Judge will be superbly equipped, most obviously with the Lawgiver pistol and its wide range of ammunition types, and the Lawmaster motorcycle. To this are added further Judge equipment, such as the Birdie Lie Detector, Override Card, and Pollution Meter. A Citizen, or a Perp, might have a Double-Barrelled Stump Gun, General Arms Sg-1 XX, smoke bombs, lock hacker, and more, though unlike a Judge, a Citizen will have to pay for his equipment.

As with Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, in terms of roleplaying, the Judges in The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game are a bit one note, but then they are meant to be. That said, they are more skilled and capable, and focusing on different skills and choosing different Feats allows for some customisation and ensuring there are differences between Player Characters. That said, although they are neither as well equipped or as capable, Citizens can be anything and allow a player to roleplay free from the constraints placed upon a Judge.

Mechanically, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game uses the d20 System. So roll a twenty-sided die for any action and roll high to beat a particular Difficulty Class or Armour Class, that really is about it. The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game of course includes rules for firearms combat and vehicle chases, and so on. Really, the only new mechanic in The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game is that for a Judge making an arrest attempt and a perpetrator resisting the attempt with opposed Charisma rolls.

In terms of background, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game provides details about the Justice Department, which includes the resources and back-up a Judge can call upon, sentencing guidelines, stats and descriptions of Justice Department equipment and robots, and stats for sample Judges. Similarly, the ‘Life on the Streets’ chapter gives support for campaigns involving just Citizens, to be fair, primarily a number of Prestige Classes, but there are rules too for running street gangs, useful for a crime campaign. Both are supported by a guide to Mega-City One which covers its geography, government, habitats, infrastructure, sports, hobbies, crazes, and organisations, as well as regions beyond its walls. It is decent enough, though the selection of NPCs and perps is intentionally generic, so none of the Angel Gang,  the mobster Uggie Apelino and the Ape Gang, the vigilante Blanche Tatum, the infamous Judge murderer, Whitey, or Judge Death. Such characters and criminals would of course be saved for the supplement, Mega-City One’s Most Wanted. On the plus side, this does mean that the Player Character Judges will be investigating and arresting perps of the Game Master’s own devising and building their own legends instead of emulating that of Judge Dredd himself, but on the downside, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game loses some of the flavour of the setting without them. A nice touch is that it is possible to play Ape characters, although they do not necessarily have to be gangsters.

Unfortunately, there is no beginning scenario for The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game in the core rule book. That said, there is advice for the Game Master on running both Judge and Citizen campaigns, along with scenario ideas and campaign variants. This is decent enough and the Citizen campaign is certainly supported with supplements such as Rookie’s Guide to Criminal Organisations, Rookie’s Guide to the Block Wars, and The Rookie’s Guide to the Crazes.

Physically, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game is reasonably well written and comes as a full colour hardback, though calling it that is a slight stretch. Yes, colour is used throughout, literally just on the header, footer, and outside margin of nearly every page. And whilst there is artwork throughout taken from the comic strip, it is all black and white, all taken from the classic strips of the seventies and eighties, and much of it presented in too small a fashion to read with any ease and just so ever so slightly fuzzy. In all too many cases, when the artwork should pop out from the page, it simply fails to do so. That said, there are fantastically good full colour full page pieces in the book, though being towards the back of the book, do not really do a lot to support the game. For example, why are full colour illustrations of Justice Department equipment over a hundred pages away from their descriptions in the text?

So the question is, is The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game any good? Well, simply put, no, it is not any good, but then neither is it any bad either. It could have been better facing towards the players and their characters by having the details about the Justice Department more upfront for the Judges, giving their players access to information about the back-up they could request and what sort of sentences they can hand out. It does give an alternative to Judge campaigns, the Citizen campaign, which could be a lot of fun. It does produce Judge characters who are at least competent and have skills and abilities, and the roleplaying game would go on to be supported by numerous supplements and scenarios. And yet, there are the mechanics. The problem is simply that The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game uses the d20 System and whilst that works, it is just not that interesting. It definitely feels more as if the Judge Dredd setting has been shoehorned on to the d20 System and it does not feel quite like a natural fit.

There is no denying that a good game could be got out of The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game, but in comparison to Games Workshop’s Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, it lacks character—even though the Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game is not a great design mechanically—and feels as it demands more effort upon both player and Game Master. Overall, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game is solid, serviceable, and supported, but its inherent blandness means it lacks that certain something which makes you want to play it.