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

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

Gamma Zine carries the subtitle, ‘A Fanzine supporting early post-apocalyptic, science-fantasy RPGs – specifically First Edition Gamma World by TSR.’ This then, is a fanzine dedicated to the very first post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, Gamma World, First Edition, published by TSR, Inc. in 1978. Gamma Zine #1 was published in April, 2019, following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of Zine Quest 1. Published by ThrowiGames!, it came as a black and white booklet, packed with content, including adventures, equipment, monsters, and more. Published as part of Zine Quest 2, Gamma Zine #2 was published in February, 2020 and promised more of the same—adventures, equipment, monsters, fiction, and so on.

Where Gamma Zine #1 began with a short interview with James M. Ward, the designer of both Gamma World and its predecessor, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma Zine #2 starts with ‘An Interview with Luke Gygax’. This is not just because his father is E. Gary Gygax, but also because he is listed as the co-author of GW1 Legion of Gold, the very first scenario for Gamma World. What is interesting about the development of the module is that Luke Gygax was just nine or ten years old at the time the adventure was written. Thus we we read about his influence over the design of the module as well as the time he spent as a child with his father. Which adds a more personal touch to our views of the man who co-created Dungeons & Dragons and began the hobby.

‘New Horrors from the Wasteland’ provides two new monsters. One is the Chog, a canine creature which seems to adsorb radiation and expell it in its bite. The bad news for the Player Characters is that the stronger the intensity of the radiation it has adsorbed, the worse its bite! The other creature is the Dizard, a lizard-type known for its tenaciousness when attacking—it likes to get a grip and keep hold, forcing a Player Character to try and break that grip! Leather taken from the Dizard is also known to be sturdy and all but fire proof.

Gamma Zine #2 also continues adding something not found in Gamma World—a Class. Classes are not a feature of Gamma World, but ‘Class Option — The Wasteland Blacksmith’ shows how they could be added to added. Following on from Artificer from Gamma Zine #1, in Gamma Zine #2, this is the Wasteland Blacksmith who makes and repairs things from the wasteland junk, earning Experience Points for doing so, but does not gain as many Experience Points from mere combat. The rules are fairly basic, but it adds flavour and enables a player to add a skill and round out his character a bit more. ‘Artifacts of the Ancients’ in Gamma Zine #1 concentrated on weapons, but ‘Artifacts of the Ancients’ in Gamma Zine #2 focuses on tools and survival aids. So the Stimpack Drone is designed to be used to deliver doses of a healing agent by remote, but others have adapted it to deliver poisons and radiation and more! The Hop-Pack provides the wearer with short jumps, the collapsible axe is a handy tool, and the Survivor Armband is perfect for anyone wanting their Gamma World adventures to be a bit more like the computer game, Fallout!

Gamma Zine #2 comes with three adventures. The first is ‘Adventure #1 — The Millionaire’s Vault’ describes the vault where a millionaire from before the apocalypse hoarded his most valuable possessions. Unless the Player Characters are looking for the reputed  ‘Cure All’ said to be hidden in its depths, there is little reason for them to visit what is actually a converted missile silo. It is more of an adventure location and as an adventure location, would work well with ‘Adventure #2 — Paradise Island’. The island of the title is home to farmers and fishermen and is known to trade in foodstuffs, but when the Player Characters arrive they discover that the island has been attacked by pirates and their mercenary island. In comparison to ‘Adventure #1 — The Millionaire’s Vault’, and even though it is quite simple, there is a whole lot more plot in ‘Adventure #2 — Paradise Island’. The vault from ‘Adventure #1 — The Millionaire’s Vault’ could easily be moved onto Paradise Island, and ‘Adventure #2 — Paradise Island’ enlarged and expanded, perhaps to form a hexcrawl of its very own also using the three adventures in Gamma Zine #1. 

‘Adventure #3 — Rescue!’ likewise includes a bit more of a plot. It describes a pre-apocalypse, advanced detention facility and the idea in the scenario is that the Player Characters need to rescue someone held in one of its cells. It is quite detailed and should present a challenge to any Player Characters attempting to break or con their way into the facility. The map is a little cramped and difficult to read, and it does feel as it could have been better orientated on the page.

The issue also includes two pieces of fiction. The first is  ‘The Hunted, Chapter Two’ which picks up from the cliffhanger that ended in ‘The Hunted, Chapter One’. In the first part, Whyla and her faithful cybernetic hound, Arnold, were ambushed by bandits and this gives the payoff. Again it is nicely written and with the resolution of the first cliffhanger sets up another. Unfortunately, the other piece of fiction, though again decently written, is not just as engaging. ‘Opportunity of Lifetime, Prologue’ really sets everything up for the next part, detailing how a student is selected for an important scientific mission. Set before the apocalypse, not a great happens and at three pages in length, it is too long a read. Hopefully the next chapter provide a better payoff.

Lastly, Gamma Zine #2 gives the Game Master another ‘Artifact Use (Solution) Flowcharts’. The focus of this set is guns and ammunition. So there are flowcharts for identifying revolvers and semi-automatics, along with standard and advanced ammunition types. It splits ammunition types because they are easy to get mixed up. Of course, some groups will find them fiddly and annoying, but they are part of the mechanics to Gamma World, so having more of them is fun.

Physically, Gamma Zine #2 is neat and tidy. It is decently written and nicely illustrated with good art throughout. Each of the scenarios is accompanied by excellent maps.

If you enjoyed Gamma Zine #1, then the likelihood is that you will enjoy Gamma Zine #2. It provides excellent support for the first edition of Gamma World, as well as for post-apocalyptic roleplaying games with a drier, slightly less fantastic tone, such as Free League Publishing’s Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days. It is not perfect though, there being a bit too much fiction and the adventures being more encounter locations than actual scenarios. This does not mean that they are not useful and the Referee can easily pick and choose how she uses the content. Certainly the adventures could be used to populate a hexcrawl of the Referee’s own devising. Overall, Gamma Zine #2 is continued solid support for Gamma World.

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

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

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

Wormskin No. 7 was published in the autumn of 2017. The issue opens with two almost mundane, but actually very useful articles. The first, ‘Common Names in Dolmenwood’ lists thirty names each for men and women, Elves, Moss Dwarfs, Woodgrues, and Grimalkin—all given as Classes in earlier editions of the fanzine, plus liturgical names for Clerics, and then Honourifics for Clerics, Fighters, Thieves, and Magic-Users. The second, ‘Henchmen of Dolmenwood’ gives rules for locating and creating henchmen and then equipping them according to Class and Race. These obviously work together, but whether in combination or apart, they fill another part of Dolmenwood’s jigsaw puzzle. Especially the ‘Common Names in Dolmenwood’ which allows the Referee to easily name common NPCs.
The bulk of the issue though is dedicated to detailing another twenty-one hexes of Dolmenwood. These include seven hexes in the north around the hamlet of Drigbolton, seven hexes in central Dolmenwood to the east of the town of Prigwort, and in the south, seven hexes around the road from Lankshorn to Dreg. So ‘Drigbolton and Surrounds’ opens with the description of ‘The Hall of the Formorian’, a domed hall atop a marble slab which is home to a blue-skinned immortal giant bound by duty to await the arrival of an unknown man named Jack, a cottage of full of ghosts ready to trade secrets, whilst near the ghost town of Midgewarrow lies the manor home Lady Mariejay Haeroth, local noble and reclusive witch. The town of Drigbolton is mentioned, but not detailed, a full description being given in the scenario, The Weird that Befell Drigbolton.
Near Prigwort is the Ravine of the Stag Lord, a lonely natural amphitheatre where the Stag Lord manifests from the Otherworld to receive homage, though sadly without his head which has been stolen! What boons might he and his stag allies bestow should someone return the lost head to him? South of the ravine on the road is the Refuge of St. Keye, a stopping point on the old pilgrimage to the abandoned Abbey of St. Clewd. Here travellers can find a night’s rest and food if they are willing to listen to a sermon or two. Before that stands the Wenchgate—from the local name for Dryads, an arch of living trees and branches carved with faces that said to welcome travellers to Dolmenwood. Northeast of Lankshorn, not far from the Ditchway is a curiously formed hillock, which will radiate strongly should any magic that detects undead be cast upon it. This is because it is actually the skull of giant of a prodigious size no longer seen in these ages. With a skull that big, what could be inside it? Travellers looking for entertainment might want to visit the Port of Dreg and Shantywood Isle, the former a seedy haunt of thieves, smugglers, charlatans, and more, the latter a cliff-sided island upon which sits Chateau Shantywood. This is a ‘manor of ill repute’, but one which is an independent state of its own! The owner, Madame Shantywood is as much a repository of rumours and pillowtalk as she is ambitious to increase her influence.
The last part of Wormskin Issue Number 7 is devoted to ‘Monsters of Dolmenwood’. This presents some nine creatures native to the Eldritch region. The format for the monster entries has been shortened into a more concise fashion by excising the lair and encounter details which were included in previous entries in the series. This is disappointing because these added detail and examples which made the monster entries easier for use by the Referee. Nevertheless, these are good monsters, many of which have appeared in this and previous issues of the fanzine, either as known denizens of Dolmenwood or as playable character types and Races. They include the Drunewife, the womenfolk of the Drune known for their enchanting songs, and their herbalism and pottery, who are often accompanied by Kilnlings, the clay figurines that serve them. The Giant Psionic Snails are gargantuan denizens of the Otherworld who feed on the energy of Dolmenwood’s Ley Lines, who are often sort out for their knowledge of the Otherworld. One is thought to reside near Lankshorn, where its thoughts manifest as a tea tent that serves the mostly refreshing of brews.
Physically, Wormskin Issue Number 7 is as well presented as previous issues. The layout is clean and unfussy, the tables of ‘Common Names in Dolmenwood’ and ‘Henchmen of Dolmenwood’ make subtle use of colour and are so easy to read. As per usual, the issue uses a mix of publicly available artwork and commissioned pieces, the latter capturing the quirky nature of Dolmenwood. The issue’s use of colour is judicious and so stands out where it appears.
Wormskin Issue Number 7 is a solid issue, detailing yet more of Dolmenwood’s weird locations and inhabitants. Of course the issue suffers from the ‘Part Work’ format of Wormskin so putting it all together is all a bit daunting. It gives Dolmenwood a patchwork feel, the issue lending itself more to parts which a Referee can pull out and add to her game rather than Dolmenwood. 

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

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

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

Where Crawl! No. 1 was something of a mixed bag, Crawl! #2 was a surprisingly focused, exploring the role of loot in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and describing various pieces of treasure and items of equipment that the Player Characters might find and use. Similarly Crawl! #3 was just as focused, but the subject of its focus was magic rather than treasure. Unfortunately, the fact that a later printing of Crawl! No. 1 reprinted content from Crawl! #3 somewhat undermined the content and usefulness of Crawl! #3. Now Crawl! Issue Number Four is just as focused as the second and third issues, but the good news is that its contents remains its own. It also differs in content from earlier in presenting the one thing—and that is a scenario.

Published in September, 2013, the whole of Crawl! Issue Number Four is devoted to Yves Larochelle’s ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’, a scenario for Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game for characters of Fifth Level. From the start, you can tell that Crawl! Issue Number Four is an Old School Renaissance scenario, since it comes with a loose cover on the inside of which the scenario’s area map is printed. The village of Thorum has recently suffered a rash of strange occurrences—the holy symbols of the Goddess of Justice have been stolen, damaged, and destroyed; bodies have been stolen from the village graveyard and been found disfigured in the nearby river; the brother of the local head cleric has been kidnapped; and a group of bandits is known to operate near the village. The question is, are these facts and events all connected? The Player Characters are asked to investigate and determine exactly what is going on.

Essentially ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’ does the traditional ‘Village in Peril’ set-up, but for mid-Level characters rather than low-Level characters. It presents numerous avenues of  investigation for the Player Characters to look into and follow up. The Player Characters should be able to grab a lead or two and perhaps gain an ally or two whilst in Thorum. The village itself is lightly detailed, so the Judge might want to develop it some more herself. Certainly, the Judge may want to provide floor plans of the local Church of the Goddess of Justice, but for the most part, she can make it up as the Player Characters conduct their investigation. Ideally, they should find the leads pointing towards the perpetrator of all of this, though there is the possibility that they circumvent much of the investigation and cut to the chase—the dungeon!

Consisting of just fifteen locations, ‘Macrobius’ Dungeon’ is fairly linear and for the most part, fairly uninteresting. The maze in its midst is really superfluous and some of the locations really deserved  more description. There is a nasty deathtrap though—well, what would be the point of a deathtrap if it is not nasty?—which the Judge will have fun with, as she will with the scenario’s antagonist, Macrobius, a wizard whose ambition and greed has led him to turn to evil. As is traditional.

‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’ is slightly oddly organised in that the scenario’s major NPCs are kept separate from the locations and potential scenes where they are encountered. What this means is that the Judge will need to flip back and forth from locations to NPCs, and although that may not slow the running of the adventure down too, it is slight awkward. In addition, the scenario includes its own ‘Appendix H’ and ‘Appendix N’. The first details a river dragon which the Player Characters may encounter and is likely to be more of a hindrance for them if they engage with it, whilst the latter details a couple of magical items both of which play an important role in the scenario.

Physically, ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’ and thus Crawl! Issue Number Four, is neat and tidy. It is light on artwork, but the few pieces are rather nice, and the writing is generally clear and easy to read. The two maps feel a bit heavy in their style and the dungeon map feels rather cramped, especially given how little information it has to convey. The format with separate is a very knowing, lovely touch.

‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’ is reasonable enough adventure, with some good investigative links and some accompanying NPCs who should be fun to portray. However, the scenario feels underwritten and underwhelming in places—the dungeon in particular—and the Judge may want to develop just a little bit further. Even without that development, ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’ should provide a session or two’s worth of play, but with that development, the scenario may be a little more flavoursome and a little more engaging. Overall, ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’ is an okay dungeon, which means that Crawl! Issue Number Four is an okay issue of the fanzine.

In a recent conversation on Twitter, a poster asked the question, “What’s a good retroclone based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons?” Various answers were given, most notably OSRIC™ System (Old School Reference and Index Compilation) and Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea: A Roleplaying Game of Swords, Sorcery, and Weird Fantasy. My response was that in most cases, retroclones start with a version of Dungeons & Dragons or Basic Dungeons & Dragons and then build up from there to emulate Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Certainly, this is the case with Labyrinth Lord and Advanced Labyrinth Lord. It is also the case with Old School Essentials: Classic Fantasy, Necrotic Gnome’s interpretation and redesign of the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay and its accompanying Expert Set by Dave Cook and Steve Marsh. With Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy presents options which emulate Advanced Dungeons & Dragons whilst restraining them in order to avoid the complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.


Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy actually consists of two separate books. These are Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells. Now the two books complement each other, but also work on their own—though only to an extent. This is because some of the Classes from Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules use some of the spells from Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells, but simply the Magic-User from Old School Essentials: Classic Fantasy could use the Illusionist spells from Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells and a game of Old School Essentials using Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules could be run without using the spells from Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells or without using the Classes that use those spells. However, Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells really work together and ideally the Referee should combine both if she wants to run Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy.

Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules provides Referee and her players with some fifteen new Classes. In keeping with Old School Essentials, nine of these Classes are Human-only Classes. These are Acrobat, Assassin, Barbarian, Bard, Druid, Illusionist, Knight, Paladin, and Ranger. What is interesting here is the inspiration for these Classes. Not just Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, but with the inclusion of the Acrobat, Barbarian, and Knight—as nods to the Thief-Acrobat, Barbarian, and Cavalier respectively—Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules actually draws upon that most contentious of supplements for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, that is, Unearthed Arcana. The other six Classes are Demihuman Classes and in keeping with Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy with ‘Race as Class’ rather than Player Characters possessing both Race and Class. The six are Drow, Duergar, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Svirfneblin, and again, in bringing these to Old School Essentials, the supplement draws heavily upon the Unearthed Urcana. The inclusion of the Drow, Duergar, and Svirfneblin also draws from the Underworld of Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games, which Old Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules also add to Old School Essentials as an adventuring environment. What is clearly missing from these fifteen new Classes is the inclusion of the Monk as a new Class, but the publisher aims to include that in a supplement to mythical Asian adventures, what will likely be the equivalent of Oriental Adventures for Old School Essentials.

For the most part, the Classes in Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules will be familiar. So the Acrobat and the Assassin are like the Thief Class, but lack skills such as Pick Pocket, Find Trap, and so on. Instead, the Acrobat focuses on jumping, tumbling, and evading, whilst the Assassin focusses on kills by stealth. Similarly, the Barbarian has some stealth skills in the wilderness, fears all use of magic, and can eventually strike otherwise invulnerable foes. The Knight adheres to a chivalric code, always attempts to wear the best armour and wield the best weapons, is a good horseman, and is immune to fear. The Paladin casts divine magic, can lay on hands to heal and turn or destroy undead. The Ranger is rarely surprised, casts Druidic spells, can track, and also perform surprise attacks in the wilderness. The Bard is different in that it can cast Druidic spells from the Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells, charm and fascinate an audience with his music and singing and learns languages and lore. Druids are of Neutral Alignment, also cast Druidic spells, can Pass Without Trace in the wilderness, rarely get lost in the woods, and can eventually shape change into animals. The Illusionist is like the Magic-User, but casts spells from Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells.

Of the six ‘Race as Class’ Classes, the Drow are like Elves, but know Divine rather than Arcane spells, suffer light sensitivity, and have an affinity for spiders. Duergar are like Dwarves, but suffer from light insensitivity and notably have mental powers like Invisibility and Enlargement that can be used daily. Gnomes cast Illusionist spells, but can wear armour and also speak with burrowing animals. Half-Elves can all use all weapons and armour and can also cast arcane spells, though not as many as an Elf or a Magic-User. The Half-Orc can use all weapons and light armour and has a number of Thief skills, whilst the Svifneblin can blend into stone, has illusion resistance, can speak with Earth Elementals, can understand the murmurs of stone, and also suffer from light sensitivity.

What is notable with all of these Classes is that the designer has tried to keep them unique, to keep their abilities from encroaching on those of Classes, and to keep them from being too powerful. The likelihood is that he has almost succeeded with the fifteen new Classes. There is some overlap of skills, for example, the Move Silently skill being shared by several different Classes. Plus Classes like the Knight and the Paladin do feel powerful in comparison to the standard Classes. That said, all of the Classes feel reined in when comparing them to their original versions from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

In addition to the supplement’s dozen or so Classes, Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules also provides a number of Advanced Character Options. These include rules for making Old School Essentials a Race and Class roleplaying game, separating the two. So all three ‘Race as Class’ Classes from Old School Essentials— Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling—as well as Humans are presented as Races, as are the Drow, Duergar, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Svirfneblin. All bar Humans have Level limits on the Classes available to them, though if this is lifted, options are given to account for the lack of Human innate abilities. Further rules cover the use of poison, extra rules for combat including two-weapon fighting and parrying, multi-classing, as well as secondary skills and weapon proficiencies. Of course these add complexity in play, but they also add depth and they move Old School Essentials towards, but not to the level of complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. And again, these rules are all optional.


Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells is the companion volume and very much contains what it says on the tin. It presents thirty-four Druid spells, from First to Fifth Level, and seventy-two Illusionist spells, from First to Sixth Level. Druid spells focus on survival, healing, and offence, so Predict Weather, Cure Light Wounds, and Call Lightning. Illusion spells focus on deception, mind control, and warping reality, so Dancing Lights, Fascinate, and Mirror Image. The selection and range have been kept in line with the Cleric and Magic-User spells of Old School Essentials, so the numbers for the Druid are the same as the Cleric, just as the numbers for the Illusionist are the same as the Magic-User. What is fantastic about Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells is how well the book is organised. It has an index for the spells plus the inside of the front and back covers are effectively used, not just with spell lists, but spot rules too. It makes Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells highly accessible and useable at the table.

Physically, both Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells are nattily presented little hardbacks. In particular, Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules follows the format of Old School Essentials by keeping its various elements particularly succinct. So every Class is kept to a single two-page spread, each individual Race to a single page, and so on. Both books are illustrated in black and white and for the most part, the artwork is good.

If there is an issue with Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells it is really that not all of either book works without referring to the other. If the Druid and Illusionist Classes are in play, then really, Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells is really necessary to effectively play because not only the Druid and Illusionist use these spells, but so do the Bard, the Gnome, and the Ranger. If there is another issue with either book, it is that they pull Old School Essentials away from its origins in the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its accompanying Expert Set. The inclusion of elements from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons may not sit well with some players and Referees of Old School Essentials, but fundamentally, both Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells are optional. Which means that they are not integral to playing or running Old School Essentials and neither Referee nor player have to purchase them to play the roleplaying game.

Ultimately, if you are playing Old School Essentials using Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells, then you are not playing the Basic Dungeons & Dragons of 1981. However, neither are you playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, Old School Essentials using Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Genre Rules and Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Druid and Illusionist Spells presents the means to incorporate elements of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but in a restrained fashion, adhering to the simplicity of Old School Essentials throughout.

An Inner Darkness: Fighting for Justice Against Eldritch Horrors and Our Own Inhumanity is a Call of Cthulhu book with a difference. Published by Golden Goblin Press following a successful Kickstarter campaign, An Inner Darkness is an anthology of six scenarios for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition which explores where the all too human horrors of the Jazz Age and Desperate Decade intersect with the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. In six scenarios it deals with issues not normally explored or addressed in Call of Cthulhu—child labour and exploitation, the poor treatment suffered by veterans of the Great War in the subsequent decade, sexual assault, mob violence, and nativism and religious persecution and racial discrimination. None of these are easy subjects to deal with and for this reason An Inner Darkness comes with a Reader Advisory warning the reader that it contains Mature Content. What this also means is that An Inner Darkness is not necessarily a book for every Call of Cthulhu devotee or group—and that is fine. Just like the superlative Harlem Unbound from 2017, An Inner Darkness deserves to have a place on our gaming shelves, for if it is not to your tastes, then it is to someone else’s.

From the start it should be made clear that being an anthology of scenarios for a roleplaying game, the Reader Advisory on An Inner Darkness is all the more pertinent and all the more potent. This is entirely because of the nature of roleplaying itself. Neither the Keeper nor her players will be sat comfortably watching, reading, or listening to the content subject to the Reader Advisory. Instead, as players they will be roleplaying characters interacting with horrible situations and persons with points of view and opinion which though regarded as reprehensible today, would have been seen as the norm in the period in which the six scenarios in An Inner Darkness are set. Further, the Keeper has the unpleasant task of describing these situations and roleplaying the men and women who hold to such outlooks and opinions. Here is perhaps the one major issue with An Inner Darkness, that there is little in the way of advice for the Keeper in portraying these NPCs.

To get the very fullest of these scenarios the Keeper may want to have access to several other supplements. These include H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, Secrets of New York, H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, and Secrets of Los Angeles. Note that none of these supplements are necessary to run the scenarios in An Inner Darkness, but they may be useful.

An Inner Darkness opens with ‘Dreams of Silk’ by Christopher Smith Adair. This takes place in Brights Mill, Pennsylvania in 1922 and explores the darker side of child labour during the period, including unsafe conditions, dangerous materials, and a lack of concern for worker safety. Children of poor and working-class families were often expected to work as it brought much needed income for their families and there were fewer regulations and protections governing their working conditions. The investigators are asked by a representative of the Women’s Trade Union League to help investigate Hempstead Chemicals, a local manufacturer of cosmetics. Several of the child employees have fallen sick or even died after terrible accidents. Ultimately, the factory becomes the focus of the investigators’ attention, a nicely creepy environment, listless during the day, weird at night. The scenario also dovetails into The Dreamlands, though only in minor way. Here the Mythos is used to exacerbate the situation, though Humans are ultimately responsible for the situation. Pleasingly, the scenario also directly addresses the problems which occur should the investigators decide to burn the factory down, as well as possible consequences.

Brian M. Sammons’ ‘When This Lousy War is Over’ is about the conditions and experience of veterans, in particular, severely injured veterans—mentally and physically, returning from the Great War. Without easily available medical and psychiatric treatment or veterans’ services, the veterans have to rely on each other. Despite this, some are unable to cope back in ordinary society, and this lies at the heart of the scenario. Set in Arkham, Massachusetts, it begins with the investigators learning that a friend of theirs, a veteran of the Great War, has been found murdered. It quickly becomes apparent that the victim had no enemies and beyond his membership of the local outpost of the Veterans of Foreign Wars association, was an ordinary member of society. So who killed him? This feels very much like a traditional investigative scenario, but it examines the tensions between the members of Veterans of Foreign Wars and local society, how they are tolerated, but only up to a point. Of all the scenarios in the anthology, this is perhaps the most muscular in tone and likely to end in a stand-up fight.

The third scenario, Jeffrey Moeller’s ‘A Fresh Coat of White Paint’ is the first one where the Reader Advisory for An Inner Darkness is really applicable and the first one to really make the Keeper and her players uncomfortable. It is set outside Los Angeles in 1931 and is the first of two scenarios in the anthology to deal with nativism—the promotion and protection of the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants. During the nineteen twenties and thirties the target of nativism in California were Mexican immigrants, which was only exacerbated by the onset of the Great Depression. ‘A Fresh Coat of White Paint’ takes place in an actual location, the Elysian Park tramp stockade where ethnic Mexicans—whether immigrants or actual American citizens—are forcibly held until they agree to be extradited. The conditions are appalling as more and more Mexicans are rounded up and incarcerated, the guards openly racist, and the charity providing aid and food to the stockade barely so. As journalists, social activists, police officers, and so on, the investigators get called into the stockade when a young girl goes missing from within its confines. Now of course the Mythos is involved in her disappearance, but the real horror of the scenario is in dealing with the ghastly attitudes of the guards which has the implicit support of Los Angeles society. Investigating the disappearance will challenging enough, but stomaching the attitudes of the guards and the conditions the Mexicans are kept in is likely to be more challenging, worse because they may have to stomach it in order to get into the stockade. What is interesting about how the author of the scenario—an immigration lawyer—draws parallels between ‘A Fresh Coat of White Paint’ and the contemporary situation with immigration and migrants.

‘A Family Way’ switches to New York and confronts an issue at the heart of the Mythos, which has been alluded to over and over in Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian fiction—specifically the sexual assault on men and women by Deep Ones. When a young lady of the investigators’ acquaintance attempts to seduce one of them, it is quickly revealed that she is pregnant. Not only that, but pregnant through rape. The horror of this situation is compounded by the then attitudes towards women with unwanted pregnancies, rape, and the solutions to the problem. This includes abortion. Which will lead to some interesting—probably demanding—roleplaying as the players navigate their investigators through the situation and the Keeper portrays the victim. It almost seems superfluous that the scenario compounds the situation with the return of the Deep Ones responsible and whilst this leads to a memorable confrontation in New York harbour, hopefully in the long term the Keeper and players alike will remember ‘A Family Way’ for the nature of its origins and the roleplaying required.

Helen Gould’s ‘Fire Without Light’ confronts rampant racism and mob violence in the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 in Oklahoma. It is a year later and tensions between the black and white communities in the town are still high—and set to get even higher as the scenario progresses. Whether as survivors of the riots, journalists or activists come to the town a year later, preachers come to provide succour, the investigators will find themselves faced with three challenges. The first is defusing the rising tensions to prevent any further outbreaks of violence, whilst the second is trying to find out what is causing tensions to escalate once again. The third though, is probably the most difficult, and again is having to deal with both the racism of the period and the then society’s acceptance of it.  The consequences of the investigators’ actions are nicely explored and there are potential links in the scenario’s set-up to Harlem Unbound.

The last scenario in the anthology takes the investigators to Maine and another period of intolerance and racism. ‘They Are From Away’ by Charles Gerard is set in the Pine Tree State in 1923 at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was highly active in the state’s politics. The targets of the Klan’s racism in this scenario are not African Americans, but rather French-Canadian immigrants who work the state’s lumber camps. The migrant workers are also vilified for their Roman Catholicism, which is decried as being unamerican. The investigators—professionals within the city’s Catholic community, church officials, activists rallying against the Klan’s activities, dissatisfied members of local law enforcement, and so on—are called to Bangor where a local church and the French-Canadian immigrants have both been subject to a rash of strange sanguinary occurrences. The investigation takes place against a backdrop of growing Klan activity, French-Canadian obstinance, and rumours of a curse, but help will come from a surprising source. For the most part, this is a straightforward enough investigative scenario, though one which literally has a bloody ending.

Rounding out An Inner Darkness is a trio of Investigator Organisations, a feature of Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition which helps explain and support the Investigators’ motivations for looking into the Mythos again and again. They start off strongly with ‘The Caldwell Book Mobile Service’ by Oscar Rios, a mobile library service which not only provides communities without a library access to books to borrow, but also fights the Mythos! The other two are both by Jeff Moeller and are not as strong. ‘A Bunch of Troublemakers’ describes a suffragette who infiltrates activist groups and spurs them into investigating the Mythos, whilst ‘Friends from Boston’ broadly details a protest group which funds efforts to expose governmental abuse, highlight injustice, and support reform. In comparison to ‘The Caldwell Book Mobile Service’ neither feel immediately compelling.

Physically, An Inner Darkness is a step up in quality from previous books from Golden Goblin Press. Colour is used throughout, and whilst the book is liberally illustrated, the use of colour marrs some of the artwork, making it look cartoonish and detracting from its intended impact. Photographs are used occasionally too, and these are sharp and well presented. The writing though, does feel rushed in places, and perhaps could have done with a closer edit.

An Inner Darkness presents a sextet of well researched, heavily historical scenarios which confront the reader, the player, the Keeper, and the investigator with the injustices, the awful attitudes, and accepted practices of the period. This makes them difficult to run—as does the specific time periods for many of the scenarios—and to play. As they should. Playing these scenarios should make player and Keeper alike uncomfortable, for they highlight how horror can be found in mankind’s darkest nature—and that is even before the Mythos exploits that nature. An Inner Darkness: Fighting for Justice Against Eldritch Horrors and Our Own Inhumanity deserves its ‘Mature Content’ advisory not just because of the subject matter, but also because despite its distasteful nature, it is handled in a mature fashion.

In ages past the world ended. In the skies above Babylon, the greatest city on Earth, specks of black mist appeared, pulsated, and grew, extending until the heavens were engulfed by an ocean of darkness. Even in the darkness, gashes could be seen in the newly sundered skies and from them cyclone-like tentacles reached out and began to rip the world apart. As prayers to the gods went unanswered, helpless men, women, and children were swept up into the turmoil and into the Void beyond… In this way the world ended, and mankind fell from grace. Many centuries have passed and the descendants of those survivors who were ripped from Ancient Mesopotamia struggle for their existence between the cracks and in the shadows in the slums of Llyhn the Eternal City, a dystopian cosmopolis and trading hub at the epicentre between the Cosmos and the Void. Living in filthy alleys and shanties among beggars, slaves and the casteless, they scrounge for scraps that fall from palaces of the unknowable alien Unseen Rulers of the city. Humanity is very much at the bottom of the social hierarchy in Llyhn, a city inhabited and ruled by eerie beings from faraway worlds, bizarre sapient entities and otherworldly Daimons from beyond the Veil. However, there are factions in the city who want this to change, for humanity to rise beyond its meagre existence. Chief amongst these are the three enclaves of humanity. These are the Feerdani enclave, consisting of a thousand labourers and dork workers ruled by the one-armed, elderly despot, Feerada; the ruins known as Beggars Court, ruled by the corpulent and paranoid self-styled Beggar King; and the Assembly, an inclusive enclave governed by a representative body which is seen as a beacon of hope in Llyhn. 

The Player Characters are inhabitants of Llyhn Eternal, seeking matronage or patronage with one of the enclaves, getting involved in the rivalries between the city’s many factions, perhaps even voyaging out from the order and constancy of the Cosmos into the chaos and catalyst that is the Void to other worlds, perhaps on missions of trade, exploration, diplomacy, and more. Yet between the stability of the Cosmos and the ethereal, fluctuating ocean of the Void, is the Veil, a metaphysical entity which keeps them apart, though there are places where the Veil is weakened to the point where the boundary between the Void and the Cosmos is blurred. This is where border worlds such as Llyhn are located.

This is the set-up for Black Void , a roleplaying game of esoteric dark fantasy published by Black Void Games and distributed by Modiphius Entertainment. Although there have been many roleplaying game of late published in Scandinavia, nearly all of them by Free League Publishing, Black Void has the distinction of being a Danish roleplaying game. It may well be the first Danish roleplaying game to be published in English.

As the descendants of Earth, Player Characters can be Pureblood Humans; Halfbloods, the result of interbreeding with another species, often regarded with hostility by other Humans; or Voidmarked, either born of esoteric and Human parents or exposed too much to the chaotic nature of the Void. They may Llyhn natives and perhaps enclave members, outsiders from a backwater world, recluses from the city, or perhaps even Lost Children returned from traversing the Void or rescued castaways from missing expeditions or colonies. A Player Character is defined by his homeworld, Traits, Background, Attributes, Powers, and Skills. A homeworld provides a Player Character with a little background information and a Talent, whilst his Traits—Agility, Awareness, Stamina, Strength, Intellect, Persuasion, Presence, and Willpower, typically rated between one and five for Human characters, but can go as high as twelve for other species. They are the equivalent of attributes or characteristics in other roleplaying games. They typically average three for most Humans and most Player Characters. Traits and Flaws are advantages and disadvantages, whilst Background defines a character’s social standing, allies, resources, and ancestry. Attributes and Powers are somewhat different. Attributes—what would be called traits in other roleplaying games—can either be Physical or Esoteric. Physical Attributes, for example, wings or horns, may be found amongst Halfblood and Voidmarked characters, whilst only the Voidmarked may have Esoteric Attributes, such as Ageless or the beguiling Daimonic Whispers. Powers are supernatural abilities, either Mystic powers, Blood Rituals, or Void powers. Mystic powers enable a character to channel his mental energies or inner Void to manifest phenomena and change reality around him; Blood Rituals require deal with sacrificial divination, bloodletting rituals, and other practices in order to enhance the practitioner; and Void powers are innate inhuman abilities and manifestations, available only to the enlightened.

For the most part, character generation is done by Point Buy. A player has forty-eight Character Points to spend on everything. Half of these are assigned to the character’s eight Traits, giving them a value of three each. Deducting three from each Trait gives its bonus for actions and skill rolls, so a Trait needs to be at least four to provide any bonus. The other half is spent on Talents, Backgrounds, Attributes, Powers, and Skills. Talents and Flaws are associated with particular Traits. A Trait must have a value of three or more to have an associated Talent, or a value of three or less to have an associated Flaw. Being a Halfblood or Voidmarked character also costs points, but grants access to Attributes that an ordinary Human character would not have. 

Skills are ranked between zero and twelve, from Dabbler to Legendary, and must be purchased at a Rank of zero before they can be raised to a positive value. For every three ranks in a skill, a character can have a specialisation, but each specialisation costs three points. A character also has two other values. Enlightenment is a measure of his intuitive understanding of the greater Cosmos, Void, and the Veil, and can be a boon or a bane, but ultimately tracks his climb to illumination and the powers that grants him. Initial Enlightenment depends on a character’s origins and can only be improved through play. Wastah represents a character’s personal influence, typically ranging between one and three.

Our sample character is Bagrah, an orphaned Halfblood human who nominally works in an abattoir handling animals, but finds more work as a small time thief, thug, and hired muscle. His height and weird eyes unnerve many people, which can be to his advantage. He wants to improve his existence, but does not know how.

Name: Bagrah
Race: Halfblood
Homeworld: Enlightened – Core
Age: 19 Gender: Male
Appearance: Lanky and wiry; feathery hair, vertical; slits for eyes

Agility 4 (+1) (Talent: Fast Reflexes)
Awareness 4 (+1) (Talent: Vigilant)
Stamina 3 
Strength 3 
Intellect 3 (Talent: Focused)
Persuasion 2 (-1) (Flaw: Blunt [Mild])
Presence 2 (-1) (Flaw: Bad Aura [Mild])
Willpower 3 

Health: 28 Sanity: 8 Move: 5 Defence Value: 9 Enlightenment: 0 Wastah: 0

Backgrounds: Caste: Kalbi, Local 
Powers: Retractable Small Claws, Night Vision

Skills: Athletics 1, Animal Handling 0, Dodge 1, Larceny 1, Stealth 1, Streetwise 1, Unarmed Combat 1

Notes: +1 interaction from homeworld; +1 modifier to subterfuge, disguise and associated rolls.

Character creation and getting the points balanced between Backgrounds, Traits, Powers, and Skills is slightly fiddly to get quite right. At even the standard power level for starting characters a player will need to decide which of these his character will focus on. Certainly unless a character is focused on skills, he is unlikely to have any Specialisations as they are so costly.

Mechanically, Black Void uses a standard roll and add mechanic, employing a twelve-sided die. To this will be added modifiers from a character’s appropriate Traits, Talents, and Skills. An easy task has a difficulty rating of four, an average task a difficulty rating of seven, a challenging task a difficulty rating of ten, and so on, going up in steps of three all the way up to twenty-five for an impossible task. A roll of a one is a critical fumble, whilst a roll of a twelve is a critical success and enables the die to be rerolled and the result added. Various effect rolls, such as weapon damage, are rolled on two, three, four, six, and twelve-sided dice.

Combat uses the same mechanics, the difficulty to hit an opponent determined by his Defence Value. In general, combatants get only one action per round and this can be used up if a character needs to dodge or parry an attack, so a player will need to be more careful in his choice of actions as there is no automatic attack attempt. Armour reduces damage, but its bulk can impede attacks or other actions, and weapons can have other properties, such as piercing for a spear or knockdown for a mace. Both arms and armour can be modified and customised for further effects.
                                                                                               
Magic plays a major role in Black Void and comes in three types—Blood Rituals, Mysticism, and Void powers. Of these, only Blood Rituals and Mysticism are available at the start of the game, whilst Void powers come through being exposed to the Void or gaining Enlightenment. Magic is very different to that of other fantasy roleplaying games and has an adult tone in places. Notably, this is with Blood Rituals, the practice of ceremonial sacrifice of living animals, beasts, and sometimes even sentient or Daimonic beings. This is divided between bloodletting, the blood being consecrated, offered, or ritually consumed to confer its innate powers and thus a temporary ability, bonus, or advantage on the practitioner or other recipient, and sacrificial divination, in which the entrails and blood of a sacrificial animal are examined to elicit an answer to a query supposed fortune, insight, or providence. Mysticism is influenced by the Void and enables its practitioners to alter reality with inexplicable, wondrous, and oftentimes quite dangerous phenomena, and as such can only be practised by the Voidmarked, the enlightened, or those who have otherwise been affected by the Void. Practitioners of Mysticism are either Furores or Gnostics, depending upon if they use their Willpower or Intellect respectively. Furores tended to be untrained and unleash passion fuelled displays of unrefined powers, whilst Gnostics are trained and meditative, capable of creating more subtle effects. They cannot channel as much power as Furores, but know techniques which enable them to withstand the deleterious effects should they lose control of their power.

Our sample Mystic is Gulandam, a healer and scholar in good standing with the Beggars Court despite his appearance. 

Name: Gulandam
Race: Voidmarked
Homeworld: Llyhn Native
Age: 59 (Elder) Gender: Female
Appearance: Short and obese; speckled skin, hair tendrils, all black eyes, tendril beard, four fingers on each hand, four toes on each foot.

Agility 2 (-1)
Awareness 3 
Stamina 2 (-1) (Flaw: Obese [Mild])
Strength 2 (-1) (Flaw: Frail [Mild])
Intellect 4 (+1) (Talent: Quick Learner)
Persuasion 3 
Presence 3 
Willpower 5 (+2) (Talent: Resolve)

Health: 16 Sanity: 39 Move: 4 Defence Value: 7 Enlightenment: 0 Wastah: 1

Backgrounds: Educated, Local

Powers: Ageless, True Sight, Mysticism (Gnostic) 1– Spheres: Life (2), Mind (2)

Skills: Anatomy 1, Bladed Weapons 0, Enquiry 1, Herbalism 1, Occult Lore 1 

Then there is Enlightenment. Through a growing awareness and comprehension of the Cosmos and the Void, a Player Character can climb tiers of Ascension, becoming increasingly sensitive to the Void and able to express various powers. Enlightenment only comes about through play and it is up to the Arbiter to decide when a Player Character progresses.
Bagrah has been hired to mug Gulandam, part of the rivalries besetting the Beggars Court. The Arbiter Gulandam’s player must make an opposed Observation roll versus Bagrah’s Stealth check. The Stealth check figures in Bagrah’s Agility modifier and Stealth skill, which is +1 each. His player rolls the die and adds +2 for a result of 9, modified to 11. Gulandam has no modifier, nor the Observation skill, so is untrained and suffers a -3 bonus. His player rolls an 11, modified to 8. Bagrah has achieved surprise and consequently, beyond his natural Defence Value of 7, Gulandam cannot react to the attack. Bagrah unleashes his claws and leaps to attack. His player will add +1 for Bagrah’s Agility modifier and +1 for his Unarmed Combat skill. Unfortunately, Bagrah’s player rolls a natural 1—a critical fumble! This means his player rolls on the Mishap Table, the result being a ten in which Bagrah pinches a nerve and cannot conduct any combat manoeuvres the following round.In the next round, both players roll for initiative. Gulandam has no modifier, but Bagrah gains a total bonus of +2 from his Agility and Fast Reflexes Talent. Bagrah’s player again rolls a natural 1! There is no penalty for this, but Bagrah is obviously slowed by the pain. Gulandam’s player simply rolls a 7. Now both players will declare their characters’ actions. Bagrah’s player says that he will be doing no more than dodge whatever Gulandam attack will make, whilst Gulandam’s player decides that the Mystic will strike fear into Bagrah using the Mind Sphere of his Gnosticism. This takes three separate steps. First to determine the Potency of the Mystic channelling, then make a to-hit roll and roll, followed by a damage roll.Potency depends on the channelling time, range, duration, area, and the Rank of the Sphere used. An instant channelling time has a Potency of 6, but Gulandam has time to concentrate before Bagrah can act. Gulandam spends a second concentrating on the channelling, reducing his initiative to 3 and the Potency to 5. Range is inside three metres and duration is instant, so the Potency is not increased, but the target of one person increases it by 1. It is also increased by 2 for Gulandam’s Rank in the Mind Sphere. This gives his player a Difficulty of 9 to beat. To this, Gulandam’s player will add +1 each for Gulandam’s Intellect modifier and Mysticism Rank. He rolls a 9, adds +2, for a total of 11. Gulandam has successfully channelled the Gnostic forces and his player now makes the to-hit roll. Bagrah has a high Defence Value and Gulandam has a poor Agility, giving a -1 modifier to the attack roll. Fortunately, Gulandam’s player rolls an 11, which means Gulandam successfully strikes his assailant. At Rank 2 of the Mind Sphere, Gulandam can force Bagrah’s player to make a roll against Difficulty rating of seven. Unfortunately, Bagrah’s player rolls a 5 and Bagrah is suddenly affeared… This means he has to roll on the Fear effect table, and on a seven, Bagrah is panicked, and must flee for three rounds and is at a penalty to act against Gulandam.Black Void is split into two parts. The first half presents the rules for both the players and the Arbiter—as the Game Master as known in Black Void—and quite an extensive equipment list also, including lists of physician’s tools, infusions and teas, services and labour, and so on. The second half is for the Arbiter. Here it presents solid advice on running and setting up a game, before delving into the world or worlds of Black Void itself. This includes an examination of the Void itself and the means and dangers of traversing it; perforations between the Void and the Cosmos, and the appearance and nature of the perforations where they appear; and information about the most common routes through, in particular those overseen by the Unseen Rulers of the Eternal City. The focus of the Arbiter’s section is Llyhn Eternal and here it is given a good breakdown of the city’s sections, factions, and so on, complete with decent maps, personalities, and plot hooks. The bestiary provides a selection of strange  sentient and non-sentient races. They include the curious and diminutive four-armed Aq’Jarea, traders and travellers known to hire guides and guides; the Eybolq, a black-scaled, aquatic-looking creature that swims through the air rather than the water and has a strange aims and known to feed upon the mental capabilities of its targets; and the Harith, bulky, six-armed blobs of muscle known for their sense of honour, their singing voices, and the great flotillas they travel the Void in. Lastly, nine worlds are described as potential destinations to go beyond the Veil.

Black Void is a roleplaying game in which not only are the Player Characters at the bottom, but so is the rest of Humanity. They cower at the bottom of a highly stratified and strict caste system, wanting to improve themselves as does the remnants of Humanity. However, step out of line and the powers that be in Llyhn the Eternal, the Unseen Rulers and their servants, are all too ready to swat Humanity like insects. Improving themselves will take matronage and patronage, allies, dangerous missions, and more. At times it involves the Player Characters to the Void, which may change them, make them less or more than Human. The question is, as the last bastion of Humanity, are they and the enclaves of Humanity in Llyhn prepared to sacrifice that? 

Physically, Black Void feels as dark as its name suggests. All of the pages are given a faded sepia wash and whilst is quite heavily illustrated, the artwork varies in quality. Much of the black and white art is of questionable quality, whilst the majority of the full artwork is very, it is often too dark, often murky, to really see the rich detail that it probably has. It needs an edit too in places, but otherwise in terms of the text is decently written.

Black Void is an amazing fantasy creation, dark and different in its feel with a great deal of originality and yet… Black Void simply suffers from poor design in terms of the way in which it presents its information. Fundamentally it is not sufficiently upfront what the game is or what is about and what the players can roleplay and what they are doing. In fact, there is not really enough background presented to the players at all before they are given the means of creating characters and then the rules. For the Arbiter, there is no explanation of what the game is about until halfway—two hundred pages—through the book. What this means is that the players are given the means—or the how—of character creation, but not the why. They have no context for what they are creating which leaves the Arbiter with extra work to do in order to educate her players. Certainly, Black Void needed some sample characters complete with backgrounds and motivations, some background with in-game voices explaining the factions and what they want, and so on. That would have prepared the players for character creation, given them basics about the background, given them some ideas about what to play, and also prepared the Arbiter for her own half of the book. It does not help that the core book lacks a scenario to help her get started either.

Black Void is a fantastical creation, genuinely original. It reads as if One Thousand and One Nights has been cast upon an alien shore under skies of cosmic horror and that is a weird combination. As a roleplaying game, Black Void takes more effort and makes more demands upon the players and the Arbiter than what its very different setting should, all of them unnecessary if it had been more clearly designed and presented. If as a Referee you are looking for a different, original fantasy setting, then Black Void is worth investigating, but bringing it to the table will be a challenge.

Best Left Buried is a fantasy horror roleplaying game in which characters venture into the crypts and caves below the earth in search of secrets and treasures and there face unnameable monsters, weird environments, eldritch magic, and more… Whilst deep underground, they will be under constant stress, face fears hitherto unknown, and the likelihood is that they will return from the depths physically and mentally scarred, the strangeness they have seen and the wounds they have suffered separating them from those not so foolish as to descend into the dark. Published by Soul Muppet Publishing, there are several versions of Best Left Buried. Although all three contain the same basic rules, they vary according to the extra information they contain. So Best Left Buried: The Zini Edition offers a lightweight, basic version intended for ease of play; Best Left Buried: Cryptdigger’s Guide To Survival includes more information for both player and information as well as everything in Best Left Buried: The Zini Edition; and Best Left Buried: Deluxe Edition contains everything plus background and extra rules.

Best Left Buried: The Zini Edition or A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Rules is probably the most accessible, presenting its contents in discrete, self-contained chapters or ‘Zinis’. The idea here is to minimise page-flipping and the format has also been applied to its companion, A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons. This is an anthology of fifteen mini-dungeons and mini-locales reduced to the ‘Zini’ format, just four pages per entry, written by a diverse number of writers working in the Old School Renaissance hobby. Each entry adheres to the same format, a title page providing an illustration of the dungeon’s main antagonist, a quick introduction to the dungeon, a page listing each of the monsters and any treasure to be found in the dungeon, and then a double-page spread showing the plans or maps of the dungeon, building, or locale with its room descriptions circling the map. The result is generally easy to read, though anyone used to traditional maps with their numbered locations may need to make a slight adjustment to get used to the self-contained design.

A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons is bookended by maps. It 
opens with a combined map and table of contents for the anthology’s content. The map is of the Eastern Isles, part of Soul Muppet Publishing’s The Thirteen Duchies of Lendal setting. It closes with a full map of The Thirteen Duchies of Lendal which shows an oddity that the Eastern Isles are actually in the west of Lendal. The map at the front of the book does at least mark the Eastern Isles’ major duchies along with the locations of the fifteen dungeons and their page numbers. This though highlights the issue of the lack background given in the anthology to either the Eastern Isles or The Thirteen Duchies of Lendal. A Zini devoted to either would have provided some context to the fifteen dungeons in A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons.

The dungeons or locations or encounters vary wildly and weirdly, from caves occupied by alien creatures from the stars and the unknown and halls and houses fallen to the macabre and the magical to islands which breath and swallow and ravines stalked by insectoid monsters. For example, ‘Hearteater’s Hall’ is a rural Elven manor house, home to the late Lord Holston, a Blood Elf who has and regressed into savagery and a meaty diet with servants who would love to have the Cryptdiggers to dinner, whilst ‘Like Family’ details Remly House, a manor home to a coven of mages which has not been heard from recently and so perhaps might be worth investigating or even burglarising… The Game Master will have fun with a particular NPC in this scenario, a talking book and there are lots of little details here for the player characters to dig into. Elsewhere ‘The Prophet’s Valley’ offers visions from the ninth child of a Gorgon at the end of a ravine—or plenty to steal and ‘Transmuter’s Tower’ is home to a noted wizard and sage who has not been seen since a calamitous sound was heard from within its walls. Other dungeons include tombs and caves and temples, and so on, some located in jungles, some in ravines, some by the coast.

Perhaps the two dungeons in A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons that stand out are not dungeons at all, but rather mini-hexcrawls which give the monsters and situations described room to breathe. Literally in the case of ‘Maw Isle’, and literally not in ‘White Hair’. ‘Maw Isle’ is part island, part tentacular monster, that hunts and crunches ships. The seas around the island seem to rise and fall as the island breathes even as shipwrecked survivors do their best to get by until rescue arrives or another ship presents a means of getting off the island. ‘White Hair’ is even stranger, a village, the surrounding hills, grottoes and tombs under a rain of white hair that falls each time a singular dragon takes to the sky. Exploring the mini-region exposes the Cryptdiggers to more and more of the strange hair and as it more and more gets everywhere, they get infected by it and they begin to transform… This is delightfully weird set-up, the infection driving the Cryptdiggers to discover what is going on.

In general, A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons provides a good mix of dungeons, houses, caves, and other adventuring location. There is always a sense danger to them, something not quite right about them, whether it is a mad researcher bent on obtaining hidden lore at all costs, alien scorpions attempting to conquer the world, or a fertility cult blasé about its sacrifices. The Zini format also leads to a sense of claustrophobia to the dungeons, if not the mini-hexcrawls. What they are missing though is context, the reason why they are there and, in many cases, why the Cryptdiggers would be interested in visiting such places. Now of course, the Game Master and her players can come up with motivations for the Player Characters, but there is no denying that one or two more, or even some, hooks would have helped to draw the Cryptdiggers into each location. 

Similarly, some information about the Eastern Isles would have been useful too, adding more context to the playing area for the Game Master and her players. Rounding out the anthology is a guide to adapting the monsters in A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons to Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games. This nicely expands the utility of the book and its contents. There are innumerable roleplaying games for which the contents of the anthology would work, whether that is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay or Mörk Borg.

Physically, A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons is a neat and tidy book, light on artwork, but what there is, is decent and the maps are all very clear.  Although in many cases, the Game Master and her players will have to supply context and motivations for the Cryptdiggers, A Doom to Speak – The Crypt Collection 1: Dungeons provides fifteen solid adventuring locations for a Best Left Buried game. They work as one-shots, but are flexible enough to work into a campaign or even be adapted to the dark fantasy roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice, but whatever the choice of game, they should each provide a good session’s worth of play. 

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

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

For the most part, the current wave of fanzines is all fantasy orientated, a great many of them dedicated to and supporting the Old School Renaissance in one form or another. Essentially an Old School form of support for an Old School style of roleplaying game. So when a new fanzine appears dedicated to a different genre it can be a breath of fresh air and when that fanzine approaches its subject in more thoughtful and detailed fashion, then that breath of fresh air might be more than a little minty fresh. So it is with Back to the Spaceport: A Fanzine for Science Fiction Games. This is a Science Fiction fanzine dedicated to all types of Science Fiction gaming, so roleplaying and miniatures, for example. It is also a Science Fiction fanzine dedicated to Science Fiction in all of its many subgenres—urban (Cyberpunk and dystopian), post-apocalyptic, interstellar travel, Victorian and Edwardian, and so on. It is also a Science Fiction fanzine which is very British in its approach to Science and it also a Science Fiction fanzine that when necessary, is prepared to examine the issues posed when gaming with a particular Science Fiction genre.

Back to the Spaceport: A Fanzine for Science Fiction Games Phase 1, Datapacket 1 is entirely written and edited by David Haraldson and you can tell that it has a serious intent from the moment you open the front cover. He takes the time to credit all of the artists, the fonts used for each article, and the particular games. This is not necessarily interesting, but it points to an aspiration towards a professionalism and a seriousness. Then flip through the pages of the fanzine and there are copious footnotes, often links to outside sources of research and the like. In terms of presentation, the fanzine is clean and tidy, perhaps slightly cluttered in places, with artwork used judiciously. The use of different fonts for article titles is very eighties, as is the organisation of the contents into different departments. So ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows’ for Edwardian and Victorian scientific romances, ‘Bright Lights, Mega City’ for urban Science Fiction, ‘Into the Ruins’ for post-apocalyptic Science Fiction, and so on, which is all very White Dwarf magazine.

The first department is ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows’ and ‘The Green Hills of Venus’. This is the write-up of the first from the Challenger Distinguished Lectures given by Professor Octavian Black. It presents his findings on the successes and failures of the first few expeditions to Venus, starting with the 1889 Chadwick expedition. In classic style, it presents Venus as a hothouse jungle planet, complete with lizardmen and megafauna, but also hints at secrets deep within the planet. Complete with a story hook and lots of knowing Easter eggs if you know the genre, its gets the fanzine off to a good start.

‘Manchester, So Much To Answer For’ is the first entry for the ‘Bright Lights, Mega City’ department, presenting two Manchester-inspired gangs—the Rusholme Ruffians and Frank’s Gang a.k.a. the Sidebottoms. The former is a gang inspired by the eighties band, The Smiths, whilst the latter a gang inspired by the papier-mâché mask-helmet wearing media personality/artist, Frank Sidebottom. More attention is paid to the latter than the former and it shows with more ideas on their gang structure and how to use them. Certainly, Frank’s Gang makes for a fun prank/performance gang to add to a Cyberpunk roleplaying game as well as the Judge Dredd & The Worlds of 2000 AD Roleplaying Game and Vurt: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game. ‘Me And My Melancholy Motor’ for ‘Into the Ruins’ provides the TEdison Razorback, a vehicle with an A.I. and a personality for getting around a post-apocalyptic world akin to that of Gamma World or Mutant Crawl Classics. Complete with a personality table and mental health crisis table, it provides a fun NPC for Game Master to bring to her campaign and roleplay.

The highlight of Back to the Spaceport: A Fanzine for Science Fiction Games Phase 1, Datapacket 1 is ‘Mx. Land & Dr. Britling See It Through’. The longest article in the issue, it explores the nature and problems of the Steampunk genre and how it applies to gaming as well as how the Steampunk movement regards gaming. In the first case, rarely as a ’punk genre and typically as a neo-colonial, imperialist celebration, and in the case of the latter, badly. Of the roleplaying games available, it highlights Marcus L. Rowland’s Forgotten Futures as probably the best roleplaying game of Victorian and Edwardian scientific romances and it also presents a manifesto for exploring the genre in the pages of Back to the Spaceport. This is an absolutely splendid read, interesting and thoughtful, certainly all but worth the price of the fanzine alone.

The articles for the departments ‘STL Signals’ and ‘Standing Orders’ are more personal and prosaic in nature. ‘STL Signals’ looks at PBM—or ‘Play by Mail’—games and the author’s experience with a couple of PBM games, Riftlords and Phoenix: Beyond the Stellar Empire. It is diverting enough and again harks back to the heyday of the hobby in the eighties. ‘Standing Orders’ is devoted to Science Fiction miniatures wargaming and ‘21st Century Fighting in Built-Up Areas’ looks at urban conflict scenarios in miniatures games where the line of sight extends across the whole of the playing area. Written for use with Ground Zero Games’ Stargrunt II rules, the rules and suggestions here can adapt to any rules system the reader prefers, the article is useful for anyone running these types of games, but is otherwise just a little esoteric in comparison to the other articles in Back to the Spaceport.

Of more use perhaps is ‘Art Crime’. Written for the ‘Under Other Constellations’ department, it is a set-up and a cast of supporting NPCs suitable for any Science Fiction roleplaying game in which interstellar travel is possible. Here the idea is that the transportation of ordinary goods is too expensive to make it worthwhile, but the shipment of luxury items, including art, does not. It consists of four detailed NPCs—The Thief, The Investigator, The Amateur Sleuth, and The Collector—around which the Game Master can build a scenario or encounter. Written for use with FrostByte Books’ M-Space and Design Mechanicsm’s Mythras Imperative, it would easily work with any number of Science Fiction roleplaying games and adapting the plot and NPCs should be easy enough. Lastly, ‘Music for Spaceports’—a nice nod to Music for Airports—reviews three albums of music suitable for use as background sounds in Science Fiction games. Of the eight articles in Back to the Spaceport: A Fanzine for Science Fiction Games Phase 1, Datapacket 1, this feels like filler.

—oOo—
In addition to the fanzine itself, Back to the Spaceport: A Fanzine for Science Fiction Games Phase 1, Datapacket 1 comes with an Old School Renaissance Science Fiction pullout. ‘On Xanadu, A Stately Pleasure Sphere!’ is written for use with White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying and similar Science Fiction roleplaying games, as well as Mindjammer – The Roleplaying Game: Transhuman Adventure in the Second Age of Space, it presents a Space Opera-style scenario/hexcrawl on the planet Xanadu, the best source of the Star Flowers, a delicacy amongst the galaxy’s elite. The planetary governor, Magnus Dominus, spends his time in seclusion in his imperial palace whilst working the planet’s population piteously hard growing the precious star flowers. The set-up is open to multiple plots, including assassinating the governor, abducting him and putting him on trial, stealing something from his art collection, fomenting rebellion, and so on. This could easily be mixed in with the ‘Art Crime’ article from the issue. Overall, this is a nice extra to the actual issue and easy enough to add to a Game Master’s campaign.

—oOo—
It is a pleasure to have a fanzine which covers a genre in the variety of its subgenres and one which does so in as high a standard across all of them. It sets the bar high for future issues, one that we can only hope that the author can maintain for the second issue and also when other contributors write for it. Back to the Spaceport: A Fanzine for Science Fiction Games Phase 1, Datapacket 1 is an engaging piece from beginning to end, thoughtful and interesting, the article Steampunk a superb highlight.

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

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

Another fanzine, another different fanzine. Time & Tide is a fanzine dedicated, to SLA Industries, the 1993 Scottish roleplaying game set in a far future dystopia of corporate greed, commodification of ultraviolence, the mediatisation of murder, conspiracy, and urban horror, and serial killer sensationalism, recently expanded with the supplement, SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1. Published by Tanya Floaker following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of the first Zine Quest, Time & Tide is subtitled ‘A fanzine examining why people love SLA Industries and the World of Progress’. It is of course not the only fanzine for SLA Industries. In the early noughties, tTH bIG pICTURE showcased another role for the fanzine, that is serving as a focal point for a roleplaying game’s fandom and support, often when that roleplaying game is between editions or out of print. As was the case with SLA Industries.

Time & Tide comes as thick sheaf of paper, a wodge of white text blocks on all dark photo backgrounds and scrappy art which screams late eighties, early nineties do-it-yourself layout. It is all filler, no game, but nevertheless all love, no hate. As the subtitle says, this is a fanzine about the love that the fans have for SLA Industries. At a hundred pages in length there are actually very few articles in the fanzine—just eight in all. There is also quite a bit of white—and more often than not—black space. The fanzine includes fiction, interviews, cake recipes, and more.

Time & Tide opens with ‘So Dark it’s U.V.’, a discussion of just why SLA Industries continues to be popular in spite of its sporadic publishing history. It also looks at the elements and themes of the game—of constantly changing technology, of suppression of knowledge, and of a truth that has its own dangers in knowing, overlaid by a Splatterpunk sensibility that reinforces the notion that life is cheap, that death can be comical, and that thrills meaning ratings (until the next thrill gets better ratings). It is a solid opening piece which lays the groundwork for the rest of the fanzine.

The highpoint of the fanzine is the ‘Interview with Nightfall Games’. The first of two interviews in the Time & Tide, this is with Jared Earle, co-author of SLA Industries and Mark Rapson of Word Forge Games, the new publisher of the roleplaying game. Conducted before the publication of SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1, this is a lengthy piece which looks at the history of the game and its future, in particular, its evolution as a war game setting in addition to being a roleplaying game. This is an informative and entertaining piece which really explains both Nightfall Games and Word Forge Games in the run up to the publication of SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1 and SLA Industries, Second Edition. The other interview is ‘Real Time’. This is with Ste Winwood about his involvement in running SLA Industries fan groups. Again, this is another personable interview highlighting the effectiveness of the fans in keeping a game alive with their support.

Between the two interviews is a much longer article, ‘The Mall of Progress’ by Ed Hill. This supports the new wargaming aspect of SLA Industries as the author takes the reader through the evolution of the terrain that he used to fight confrontations between the various factions in the World of Progress. So it goes from Cannibal Sector One over the Wall into Downtown and onto Garbage Alley and out again into the Ruined Mall and the Mall of Progress, and then back in again to a wretched housing block called Grim House. The step-by-step process looks at construction methods and the changing technology used and is accompanied by innumerable photographs. Unfortunately, these photographs hamper the article at every turn, being too dark and too murky to discern any detail. Whilst murk fits the World of Progress, it is not what you want in a wargames article where photos should bring to life what the designer has been doing. Worse, the layout of the article means extends the article over and over, and at a quarter of the fanzine’s page count combined with the poor resolution of the photographs, it just feels bloated and boring.

Tamsyn Kennedy’s ‘Underneath It All’ is the first of two pieces of fiction in Time & Tide. It tells of an Ebon’s almost worker drone existence before an encounter forces her awake and brings her to the notice of those that make her take the next step in ‘evolution’. This balances the humdrum with the eventual realisation that there is an alternative path in the ‘World of Progress’ to climbing the corporate ladder. The other piece of fiction is ‘Your Hole/Their Hole/My Hole’ by Roger Duthie which is very much the opposite of ‘Underneath It All’, telling of the wet, dank, stagnant, often horrifying nature of living on the dole in Downtown. It is quite a creepy piece, capturing life in the Mort City equivalent of a 1980s Glasgow council flat—elements of SLA Industries being a reaction to growing up and being unemployed in Thatcher’s Britain—from multiple points of view, intruders mundane and monstrous, as well as the dwelling’s occupants.

Quite literally filler, Coz Winwood’s ‘Cake Sector One’ gives recipes for SLA-themed baked goods. Three recipes are given—in oddly American measurements given the roleplaying game’s Scottish origins—and their inclusion would have been fine if they had there to offset something more substantial in terms of content in the fanzine. As it is, ‘Cake Sector One’ is all too light and fluffy in all too light and fluffy issue. Nice wordplay on the title though and there really ought to be a cooking show aimed at Shivers on duty in Cannibal Sector One within the game itself. Lastly, ‘The Bigger Picture’ is a more personal piece about SLA Industries played a role in his life and helped him when times were difficult. Hopefully the new edition of the roleplaying game and the chance to play again will make his better.

Physically, Time &  Tide is scrappy and scruffy as mentioned earlier. It certainly echoes the style of fanzines from their heyday in the eighties. Overall, it is difficult to come right out and recommend Time & Tide. It is just too light and fluffy in its content—even if that content is dark and oppressive in tone, but then what would expect, it is for SLA Industries after all—to be anything more.Time & Tide will of course appeal to devotees of SLA Industries, but it is nothing more than a diverting read as it does not include any support for the roleplaying game or the war game rules. Had it done so, then there might have been reason enough for the reader to look at it more than just the once. Time & Tide is very much not essential to playing SLA Industries and so nice enough to have if a fan, but you will not miss it from your gaming shelves if you don’t have it.

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

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

Delayed Blast Gamemaster is a fanzine of a different stripe. Published by Philip Reed Games following successful Kickstarter campaigns, Delayed Blast Gamemaster is a fanzine dedicated to supporting roleplaying fantasy games, but a particular style of fantasy roleplaying games—Dungeons & Dragons. Yet the issues are entirely systemless, which means that their contents can be used in Dungeons & Dragons, any of the fantasy roleplaying retroclones you care to name, and most fantasy roleplaying games with a little effort. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of the inaugural Zine Quest, the first issue of Delayed Blast Gamemaster was published in  September, 2019.

What strikes you first about Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1 is its graphical design. It is all white art and text on matt black pages. Now before anyone complains that this might be ink heavy when comes to the printing out of the PDF, the fanzine is sold in both heavy and light ink formats. The effect though is striking, almost jauntily creepy and oppressive in its artwork’s depiction of skeletal archers, oozes, and overly ocular creatures. The text is both heavy and large, so is a lot easier to read than it otherwise might have been.

As to the concept behind Delayed Blast Gamemaster it is simply that of inspiration scattered subject by subject across nine tables. So ‘OneDTen Urban Locations’, ‘OneDSix Forgotten Spellbooks’, FiveDSix Unusual Treasures’, ‘OneDEight Dungeon Oddities’, ‘OneDSix Magic Shields’, ‘TwoDSix Potions’, ‘OneDSix Warped Monsters’, ‘OneDTwelve Adventure Hooks’, and ‘OneDFour Dungeon Doors’. So all that the Game Master has to do is pick a table or subject, roll the die, check the relevant entry, and use it as inspiration to create something of her or adapt the entry to the roleplaying game of her choice. The most obvious choice to adapt the entry to, is of course, Dungeons & Dragons, due to the similarities in language, but other roleplaying games would work too.

For example, roll a three on ‘OneDEight Dungeon Oddities’ and you get a Necromancer’s Chest, a combination trap-monster. It is simply a necromancer’s chest which he has trapped with several ghosts. Disarm the trap or use the key and of course, a Thief opens the chest without any problems; fail and two or more ghosts are unleashed to hunt the Thief and alert the chest’s owner! Roll a four on the ‘OneDSix Warped Monsters’ and the result is the Skeletal Mage, which simply suggests giving a standard skeleton monster a spell or two or more, all to add a simple twist on a classic monster. Roll a seven on ‘OneDTen Urban Locations’ and you have found yourself at Pies (and Lies) which describes a pie shop which sells cheap, moderately tasty, meat pies. The shop also does a nice sideline in rumours and secrets, which its owner and his family either sells off to the underworld or uses to blackmail the subject of those rumours and secrets.

Now there are a lot of entries and ideas in Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1, which is the point. Perhaps though, the design of the oddities and monsters dwell a little upon Oozes and monsters like the Mimic, with entries such as the Mimicspawn, Oozegoblin, and Weremimic, but the author at least is upfront about his fascination with such creatures. The main issue is that there no index, either of the entries or the tables. Otherwise, the fanzine is well written, easy to ready, and easy to use. Physically, there is a certain heft to it both in terms of production values—which are high for a fanzine—and its feel in the hand.


Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1 is simply lots of ideas a Game Master can bring to her game. She will need to do some work to bring them into her campaign, but the ideas will work with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition as much as they would with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy , and whatever your choice of fantasy roleplaying game, further inspiration is never unwanted.

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

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

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

Where Crawl! No. 1 was something of a mixed bag, Crawl! #2 was a surprisingly focused, exploring the role of loot in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and describing various pieces of treasure and items of equipment that the Player Characters might find and use. The good news is that Crawl! #3 is just as focused, but the subject of its focus is not loot or treasure. Instead, it is magic, for the issue’s subtitle is ‘The Magic Issue!’. Published in February, 2013, Crawl! #3 includes new spell systems, new spells, a new old creature, and more. It is a serviceable rather than a good issue and for one particular reason may not be of interest who are coming to issues of Crawl! fanzine for the first time.

There can be no denying that the magic system in Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game is fun and flavoursome, but it can be cumbersome. The issue is that because every spell has its own page and its own table, the play of the game is slowed whenever spells are cast, whether by the Player Characters or NPCs. So, ‘NPC Magic and Spellcasting’ offers a more streamlined means of handling spells. The Judge still rolls for the NPC spellcaster, but rather than doing this against the standard table, the Judge is given three results—either a Fumble, a Standard, or a Critical result. For example, on a Fumble, the classic spell Magic Missile inflicts damage on the caster, hurls between one and four missiles at a target on a Standard result, and on a Critical result, the caster can target multiple opponents. The piece includes a couple of offensive spells, several defensive spells, and several spells which fall into the category of ‘Other’. Rounded out with a pair of cultists as sample NPCs given these streamlined spells, this is a fantastic option to help the Judge run her game.

Sean Ellis’ ‘Consider the Kobold: A different take on the traditional kobold’ presents a traditional take upon the Kobold. Not the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games, but that of traditional folklore. Here the Kobold is a household fairy who carries out domestic chores as long as the family respects him, although an alternative has it working the mines. The write-up includes full stats as well as various pranks—or cantrips—which the Kobold may play upon those who do not pay it enough respect.

Brett Miller’s ‘Patron Spells of the Supernal Archmage’ presents the patron spells for ‘Van den Danderclanden: A Patron from the Imminent Future’, the Supernal Archmage of Empyreal Aptitude in a distant, but parallel future. Previously detailed in Crawl! No. 1, here his favourite chaotic effects of Spellburn are detailed as Van den Danderclanden’s Hateful Blemish, Snafufubar, and Elastic Reality. The first inflicts the corruption of heavy magic use upon a target, the second focuses and inflicts bad luck upon the target of the spell, and the third can change aspects of a target or an item. There is no denying that these are fun spells to play around with and inflict some chaos upon a campaign, but problematically if the reader has already got the Special Edition of Crawl! No. 1 which collects both patron and patron spells, which makes their inclusion in either redundant.

‘Magic Wand – A 4th-level Wizard Spell’ by Daniel J. Bishop introduces the spell, Raven Crawking’s Magic Wand. This provides a means for a wizard to store spell effects in a wand of the wizard’s choosing, typically one spell, but at higher castings of the spell, up to three spells as well as granting a bonus when casting the spells from the wand. What in effect it allows a wizard to do is cast the spell worked into the wand a second time each day, but always at the Level at which the spell was worked into the wand. This means that the wizard can cast Raven Crawking’s Magic Wand again and again as he gains Levels to improve the ability of the wand. Of course, a wizard cannot simply create wand after wand for all of his spells, but a few spells it expands his arcane arsenal.

‘The Talismans of Anti-Magic – Anti-Magic Items’ by Jon Wilson details items which can prevent magic being cast upon the wearer. Whether they take the form of rings or amulets, totems or fetishes, and whomever has hold of them, they are always linked to spellcasters. They take an action to charge, but when charged they inflict a penalty equal to that given for the anti-magic talisman upon the spellcaster targeting the holder, so reducing their ability to successfully cast a spell. Unfortunately, this is not without repercussions in that the spellcaster linked to the anti-magic talisman must suffer the same effect when next casting a spell before the talisman can be sued again. This is a powerful item, but one that pleasing comes with a price which to paid by someone in the party… Lastly, Colin Chapman’s ‘Let’s Get Familiar: Expanded Familiar Entries’ simply expands the ‘Familiar Confrontation Configuration’ tables to be found in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game rulebook. It does this for the Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic tables and enables the player to roll on a table of twenty options rather than fourteen.

Physically, Crawl! #3 is clean and tidy, uncluttered and easy to read, much like Crawl! No. 2. However, there is less art and its look is all the poorer for it. Unfortunately how good Crawl! #3 is depends on which edition of Crawl! No. 1 the reader has. If it is the Special Edition which combines ‘Van den Danderclanden: A Patron from the Imminent Future’ with ‘Patron Spells of the Supernal Archmage’, then not so much and not so useful. Which to be fair is more than likely if the reader is picking the issue up since their original publication. If it is not the Special Edition, then Crawl! #3 will be more useful as its inclusion of ‘Patron Spells of the Supernal Archmage’ readily supports ‘Van den Danderclanden: A Patron from the Imminent Future’. Overall, Crawl! #3 provides solid content, but the repeated content means it is just not as useful.

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the  Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford's mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.


—oOo—
What is it?
Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass is the first in a series of guides to the role, types, and items of treasure in Glorantha.

It is a sixty-four page, full colour, 20.50 MB PDF.

Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass is well presented, decently written, and includes a wide range of artwork. The front cover is fantastic.

Where is it set?
Dragon Pass and Prax in Glorantha.

Who do you play?
The section on ‘Medicine Bundles’ will be of interest to shaman characters, but Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass will be of interest to most characters in the region.

What do you need?
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and RuneQuest – Glorantha Bestiary for its information on spirits and Dragonewts at the very least.

What do you get?
Forty years on since RuneQuest II received its own supplement dedicated to the subject of treasure in the form of Plunder, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha receives its own supplement dedicated to treasure in the form of Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass. Like Plunder, this supplement presents some notable treasures of Glorantha—in the case of this volume, treasures of Dragon Pass—some thirty of them in total. Unlike Plunder, what it does not do is present the means to generate treasure, whether that is in terms of coinage, jewels, and gems, or special items. This very much reflects the differing approaches to treasure between different editions of RuneQuest, and instead, Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass offers up a discussion of the nature, place, and role of treasure amongst the Orlanthi, followed by two essays on particular types of ‘treasure’ to be found in the region.

The supplement opens with ‘Treasure Among the Orlanthi’, which explores the attitudes that the Orlanthi have towards treasure and its types. These are physical—classic coinage, jewels, and gems; social—increased Reputation, new privileges and responsibilities, and so on; and magical—spells and boons, and other gifts from priests, gods, and spirits. The essay also examines how and why they might be rewarded as well as the outcome of such rewards. It suggests how such treasures might come into the possession of the adventurers and how they might be awarded to the adventurers. The author suggests several options, one of which he suggests is the Orlanthi method, but then goes on to point out that the all good Orlanthi adventurers are expected to pay a tithe to their clan and temple. All of the essay falls within the realms of ‘Your Glorantha May Vary’, but it is a fantastic read, well thought out and reasoned.

The first specific type of treasure examined in Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass is ‘True Dragon’s Blood’. As the title suggests, this is the blood of True Dragon, either molten direct from the body of a damaged True Dragon or found set in ruins where they have been, including those of the Empire of Wyrms Friends. More recently it could be found at the site of the Dragonrise. Despite being anathema to the gods and elements, it can be attuned to and so grant fragments of draconic powers, including being able to use Dragonewt Roads and use Firebreath. This is not without its dangers since it also unhinges the attuned from reality itself... The second type is ‘Medicine Bundles’, essentially collections of items, whether skin, bones, twigs, stones, roots, and so on, given sacred power. These are examined from the traditions of the various Praxian tribes and sacred societies, as well as Daka Fal, Erithia, and Waha. Numerous types of bundles are given, such as for contacting ancestors and spirit weapons which extra powers when user is in the Spirit Realm. This essay offers numerous items and options of interest for anyone roleplaying a shaman, as well as enhancing the spiritual aspects of a campaign. Of the two essays, this is probably the more useful.

Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass is not only connected to Plunder in terms of shared subject matter, but also in the format followed used for listing each of the treasures. That is, the new supplement uses the same format as the old, listing its description, relationships with various groups and cults affiliated and unaffiliated, who has knowledge of it, its history, the procedure necessary to create or find the item, and what powers it has. The supplement also includes an appendix listing the new Rune and Spirit magic spells to be found in its pages.

The numerous items include Adder Stones, which made from the poisoned bodies of earth elementals grant greater protection against poison when held in the hand; Bones of Luck & Death, bone dice marked with the Luck and Death Runes found in the possession of those who survive the heroquest to become the next body of Belintar, the God-King of the Holy Country, which can be rolled to grant bonuses or penalties to the owner’s next actions; Debt-Coins of Etyries, simple lunar coins enchanted and exchanged to signify that the cult of Etyries will repay a debt that one of its worshippers is unable to; and Hippoi’s Feather, a shimmering feather taken from Hippograf’s wings and woven into a horse’s mane to make it’s spirit more aware. The selection of magical items does include a few weapons, such as Fallen Star, a spear in the shape of a four-pointed star which a Yelmalio worshiper can attune to and advance its capabilities to ultimately become a master of the spear, a Son of Light, and a fierce opponent of Chaos, but whether weapons or other items, they are all interesting and come with detail enough for the Game Master work them into her campaign and use them to tell fantastical stories with.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass is fantastic treatment of treasure in Dragon Pass, combining thoughtful and interesting essays on the subject with numerous relics to help the Game Master weave treasure into the fabric of her Glorantha campaign.
No. Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass may simply not play an important role in your campaign.
Maybe. Treasures Of Glorantha: Volume One — Dragon Pass is only as useful as the role that treasure plays in your Glorantha campaign and you may want to wait for future volumes if your campaign is not specifically set in Dragon Pass.

Although the Old School Renaissance has been primarily driven by Dungeons & Dragons and its iterations, it has been accompanied by an interest in the other games of the period, so there have been new editions of Top Secret and Gangbusters, the latter with a Gangbusters Introductory Set and supplements such as Welcome to Rock Junction and GBM-1 Joe's Diner. Mark Hunt, the new publisher of Gangbusters has followed this with a roleplaying game which combines Old School Renaissance mechanics with roleplaying in the Roaring Twenties and Dirty Thirties. The result is Gangbusters B/X Edition.

Gangbusters B/X Edition or Gangbusters 1920s Roleplaying Adventure Game B/X Edition combines the mechanics of the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay—as seen most recently in Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy—with all of the setting elements of Gangbusters. So it is a Class and Level game with Hit Points and Armour Class set in the Jazz Age and the Desperate Decade of Prohibition, mob bosses, Tommy gun-toting thugs, flappers and floozies, speakeasies and swanky gin joints, small crimes and big crimes, ‘Scarface’ Al Capone, ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, ‘Baby Face’ Nelson, ‘Ma’ Barker, Bonnie & Clyde, Eliot Ness and the ‘Untouchables’, and J. Edgar Hoover. This is a roleplaying game of classic cops and robbers in player take the roles of cops, criminals, private detectives, and reporters in a town where crime and corruption is rife, almost everyone is looking to make it big or get lucky, crimes and cases are solved, and more.

A character in Gangbusters B/X Edition is defined by the traditional six abilities—Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. He also has a Class and Level as well as an Alignment and Description. The four Classes are Brutish, Connected, Educated, and Street Smart and each Class has six Levels, complete with ‘Titles’ for each Level! The Brutish Class is strong and can make multiple attacks against opponents of one Hit Die or less, are more intimidating, and effective when using improved weapons. The Connected Class knows people from particular fields such as City Hall, Society, Underworld, Sports, and so on, and can gain favours from them. The Educated Class are intelligent and knowledgeable in a particular area of expertise, such as Accounting, Forensic Analysis, Gun Smithing, Safe Cracking, and so on, and also has two Vocations. The Street Smart Class has great Dexterity and has abilities like Nimble Fingers, Move Silently, Hide, and Word on the Street. Of the four Classes, the Brutish is most like the Fighter of Dungeons & Dragons, whilst the Street Smart is like the Thief, but also encompasses the grifter and the con man. 

There are a couple of oddities in the Class designs. So the Educated Class receives two Vocations, but what exactly a Vocation is, is never explained in Gangbusters B/X Edition. The Street Smart has Thief-like abilities, but does not gain access to a skill like Safe Cracking.  Alignment in Gangbusters B/X Edition is suitably updated to reflect the period—so Law Abiding, Neutrality, or Dishonest. Character description options include Assimilated, Blue Blood, City Slicker, Hoodlum, and so on.

Our example character is Dudás ‘Slim’ Henrik, an immigrant from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who came to America following the end of the Great War. He is looking to make his way in the new country and if the incentive was right might look the other way. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the war and is trained to use a rifle. It has been several years since he used one though. Currently he works as an accountant for a number of neighbourhood businesses.

Dudás ‘Slim’ Henrik
First level Educated (Smart)
Alignment: Neutral
Description: Immigrant
Armour Class: 5
Hit Points: 2
THAC0: 19

Strength 13 (+1, +1 Open Doors)
Intelligence 14 (Literate & Eloquent)
Wisdom 09 
Dexterity 12 
Constitution 09 
Charisma 08 (-1, Max. Retainers: 7, Morale: 10)

Languages: English, Hungarian
Area of Expertise: Accounting
Vocations: ???
Equipment: $100

Unfortunately, Gangbusters B/X Edition is rather muddled in terms of its mechanics. Now of course, Gangbusters B/X Edition is an Old School Renaissance design and there need not possess a unified mechanic, a one roll for everything, but includes several different ones for different types of actions. So for the Special Abilities of the Educated and Street Smart Classes, a player rolls a six-sided die and succeeds if he rolls three or more. If a one or two is rolled, the character fails or succeeds, but is spotted in doing so. For any action not covered elsewhere, Gangbusters B/X Edition calls for an Ability check, which presumably is to roll under the player character’s value for the appropriate Ability. Unfortunately the rules do not state this, but instead have the player roll under a number assigned by the Judge, modified by +4 or -4 depending on the difficulty.

Then there is combat. Combat in Gangbusters B/X Edition works much like Basic Dungeons & Dragons B/X of 1981, but allows for unarmed combat and the use of firearms and their capacity for burst and spray fire, firing both barrels, and rates of fire. As you would expect, the player or Judge has to roll a twenty-sided die and roll high to beat an Armour Class. That Armour Class though, is descending not ascending, from ‘9’ to ‘-3’ and thus each character has a THAC0 rating. One difference between Basic Dungeons & Dragons B/X and Gangbusters B/X Edition is the lack of armour. This is, of course, to be expected, given the historical time period, but Gangbusters B/X Edition suggests that the better or the fancier the clothing worn, the higher the Armour Class bonus, so Armour Class 7 for poor quality clothing, Armour Class 5 for typical clothing, and Armour Class 3 for luxury or thick clothing.

Lastly, there are the rules for Saving Throws. These work as you would expect in Dungeons & Dragons, but like Alignment have been updated to Moxie, Quickness, Toughness, Driving, and Observation. Moxie covers grit and willpower, Quickness covers reaction speed and agility, Toughness covers endurance and durability, Driving covers all non-combat vehicle actions, and Observation covers spotting and searching for things. Like all Saving throws, these are modified by a character’s Ability modifiers. Altogether, this feels like a clash of mechanics rather than something that is easy to learn and easy to play, but while the rules and mechanics are easy enough, they do feel as if they could be easier.

In terms of what the Judge—as the referee is sometimes known in Gangbusters B/X Edition—can run, Gangbusters B/X Edition suggests several campaign types. These are Criminal, Detective, Law Enforcement, Reporter, and Strange Mysteries. Of these, Detective refers to a campaign involving Private Detectives a la Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, whilst Strange Mysteries pushes Gangbusters B/X Edition into the realms of horror, cosmic horror, and the Pulp superheroes of the nineteen thirties. Of all the campaign concepts in Gangbusters B/X Edition, Strange Mysteries is the least supported, although Gangbusters B/X Edition does offer the option of player characters being masked crime fighters in addition to their standard Classes. Each masked crime fighter receives a random Mysterious Power, such as Bolt of Power or Obscuring Mist, but will have more if any ability has a value of eighteen. Each Mysterious Power can only be once a day. The great advantage of Strange Mysteries campaign is that it is compatible with a lot of Basic Dungeons & Dragons B/X and similar content, so that monsters can easily be imported and various scenarios might work too if the Judge picks carefully.

The other campaign options are covered by their own chapters. So for a Criminal campaign, ‘PART 3: Piece of the Action’ covers criminal activities including bootlegging and racketeering, running a gang, as well as running a normal business, whilst ‘PART 5: Investigations’ covers enquiries made into crimes and mysteries which comes about as part of ‘PART 3: Piece of the Action’. Once the police and the judiciary gets involved, then ‘PART 6: The Long Arm of the Law’ comes into play and explains arrests, plea bargains, bail, trials, witnesses, and law enforcement resources. For the Judge, scattered amongst this there is a list of adversaries and advice on handling encounters, as well as an introduction to the U.S.A. of the period and to the publisher’s default setting of Rock Junction, a steeltown in the Midwest some sixty miles from the Lakefront City of Gangbusters, as well as advice on building adventures and running the game.

What Gangbusters B/X Edition does not include is advice on running long term campaigns. Now this is in part due to the fact that player characters can only achieve six Levels and so the roleplaying game is not designed for long term play. It is really also only designed for two broad campaign types, ones in which the player characters are the criminals and one in which they are not. This is because it is hard to bring the character types together and not have an adversarial relationship.

Physically, Gangbusters B/X Edition is nicely illustrated with lots of period black and white artwork. Now whilst Gangbusters B/X Edition has been proofread, it has not been edited and it very much shows. When it counts, the phrasing of the roleplaying game’s many core rules is often just odd enough to wonder what exactly the author intended, and terms get used interchangeably, such Judge, Referee, Game Master, and so on. Worse, the organisation of the book can be best described as shambolic or scattershot. Now each of the individual sections is self-contained and complete, but ordered in random fashion. So ‘PART 3: Piece of the Action’ which covers criminal activities comes before ‘PART 4: Acting as Judge’, followed by ‘PART 5: Investigations’, ‘PART 6: Long Arm of the Law’, and so on. Lastly, ‘PART 9: Combat’ comes right at the end of the book. There is just no logic to this pattern.

As a toolkit to run an Old School cops and robbers game, Gangbusters B/X Edition could have been easier to use and it could have been easier to read. In spite of this, there is no denying its scrappy charm and there is no denying that Gangbusters 1920s Roleplaying Adventure Game B/X Edition gives a Judge everything she needs to run an Old School Renaissance cops and robbers game—just not necessarily in the right order. 

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the  Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford's mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.


—oOo—


What is it?
A Rough Guide to Glamour is a guide to the capital city of the Lunar Empire.

It is a one-hundred-and-ten page, full colour, 31.31 MB PDF.

A Rough Guide to Glamour is well presented, decently written, and includes a wide range of artwork and a reasonable map.

Where is it set?
Glamour, heart of the Lunar Empire.

Who do you play?
Nothing specific. Much of A Rough Guide to Glamour is written as a tourist guide to the city for pilgrims.

What do you need?
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, although RuneQuest – Glorantha Bestiary might be useful for its more Chaotic features. Cults of Glorantha will also be useful. 

What do you get?
If you are roleplaying—or have roleplayed—in the fantastical, mystical, mythical world of the Glorantha, then the likelihood is that the enemy of choice is the Lunar Empire. Said to be the greatest civilisation in the known world, glorious and glamorous, knowledgeable of both sorcery and religion, fair in its treatment of women, charitable in its largess and treatment of the poor, welcoming of all who accept its all-encompassing faith, carried by the proselytising cult of the Seven Mothers, the Lunar Empire seeks to expand and extend its reach far and wide. Yet the Lunar Empire is an empire of monsters and demons, an empire which embraces and accepts Chaos, which stamps its faith on the territories it conquers, punishes lawbreakers harshly, sends those who fail to pay their taxes to hell dragged by Tax Demons, and commands the Crimson Bat. This great Chaos demon is fed prisoners, slaves, and rebels daily and their souls are lost forever, it constantly wanders the provinces feeding on sacrifices, and is used as a weapon of war against the Lunar Empire’s enemies. 

The latter view is held by a great many of the peoples of Dragon Pass—of Sartar, Old Tarsh, Prax, the Holy Country, and more. Yet as far as the Lunar Empire is concerned, this is the view of rebels and barbarians, of upstarts who would slap the hand extended to them, and for the most part, a minor issue in the far-flung provinces. The Lunar Empire, personified by the Red Emperor, son of the Red Empress who ascended into the Middle Air four centuries ago to become the Red Moon, has other concerns. To carry out the will of his mother, to expand the empire, to maintain its very obvious greatness, and to ensure that Glamour—capital city of the Lunar Empire—keeps its lustre as the shining ruby-red jewel of the empire. It is Glamour, the city at the heart of the Lunar Empire, which is the subject of A Rough Guide to Glamour.

Originally published in 1997 by Reaching Moon Megacorp to support its ‘Life of Moonson’, a fifty-player Live-Action Role-Playing game, it has since been greatly expanded for this new edition to throw a scarlet-hued spotlight on a city that is in many parts Rome, many parts Las Vegas, but both by way of Soviet-era Moscow, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Progressive Rock, Glam Rock, and Punk Rock. Glamour is glamour by name, glamour by meaning—any and all of them, and the authors are also trying to put a glamour on the reader in detailing the city, making it sound enticing and of course, glamorous, whilst also also hinting at the darkness behind that glamour, but unfortunately do not quite pull the trickery off. That said, A Rough Guide to Glamour is informative, interesting, and shot through in places with an incredibly tongue-in-cheek sense of humour which leaves the reader wondering if they just read what the authors had written.

A Rough Guide to Glamour includes a  gazetteer, guidebook, and map to the capital of the Lunar Empire; information and portraits of the city’s and thus the empire’s most important personages; an overview of the Lunar Empire, its history and geography; details of the cults of the Red Emperor and the goddess Glamour for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha; description and map of the Sultanate of the Silver Shadow where Glamour is located; details of the secrets of Kalikos Icebreaker, the Lunar College of Magic and the Imperial Monopolies of the Etyries cult; write-ups of the intimate doings of the Red Emperor himself and his court; a handful or two of rumours—scurrilous or otherwise; fiction, poetry, and song lyrics; and silliness.


A Rough Guide to Glamour is a performance with an astounding cast— with Elvis Presley as Moonson Argenteus, the Red Emperor; Danny DeVito as Ivex Devouring Dog, Chief Tax Collector; Eva Green as Jar-eel the Razoress, Fourth Inspiration of Moonson; Margot Robbie as The Red Dancer of Power, Chief Missionary; Cate Blanchett as Asvedava the Black, Dean of the Field School of Magic—and more. Ostensibly written as a guide to the city for pilgrims, its primary focus is on what is the front half of the Lunar Empire’s circular capital—the City of Glamour, rather than the City of Dreams behind it with its route beyond to the Crater where the Red Goddess ascended. It thus introduces the city and guides the potential tourist round the city, its great buildings such as Red Square paved with polished stone brought down from the Moon and upon which thousands of pilgrims each year to prostrate themselves on the material body of the Red Goddess, and Hideous Zoo where all manner of exotic and weird—even Chaos—beasts are put on display. Where to stay and where to eat—such as Moon Rock Café for breakfast; customs such as always taking more than a few extra Lunars in the case of on-the-spot fines; and other facilities, like the lime-washed buildings marked with the Man Rune and staffed by Broo that are there for the Pilgrims’ convenience. A ‘Major Holidays & Festivals’ guide suggests when the best time is to visit the city and for anyone out of town, there is an introduction to ‘Let’s Speak New Pelorian!’, the local dialect designed to be less hierarchical, racially stereotypical, or gender biased, but definitely more Orwellian. Then there is the advice that Glamour is currently under Xaroni Law due to the depredations of a masked vigilante known only as ‘the Bat-Man’…

The nature of the City of Dreams beyond Glamour is best explored in various pieces of fiction which the depiction of the dissolution of Moonson Argenteus, the Red Emperor, parallels are strongly made between him and the last years of Elvis Presley. A Rough Guide to Glamour does go beyond the walls of the city itself, specifically to look at ‘The Sultanate of the Silver Shadow’, the region directly ruled by the Red Emperor and his family and to look at the empire in broader detail with ‘A Brief History of the Lunar Empire’, which will provide context for much of the rest of the supplement. Two cults and their roles in Glamour and the Lunar Empire are detailed in A Rough Guide to Glamour. These are ‘The Red Emperor: Governing Cult of the Lunar Empire’ and ‘Glamour Goddess of the Capital of the Lunar Empire’, both quite local cults, but given detailed write-ups for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. They are the only game mechanics content to be found in A Rough Guide to Glamour. There is of course much more to be found in the supplement, but special mention should be made to ‘Pelorian Rhapsody’ and the praise poem to Glamour inspired by Eurythmics lyrics!
On the downside, the focus on the glamour and glitz of Glamour in A Rough Guide to Glamour means that its ‘rough’ side is all but ignored. There are hints given, such as the chain gangs forced to work nightly repairing the paved streets for the following morning and the inevitable fate of those who do not pay their taxes. Similarly, it does not explore the life or place of the average citizen or peasant of Glamour, but to be fair, that is not the purpose of A Rough Guide to Glamour—in 1997 or 2020. Nevertheless, anyone awaiting a comprehensive guide to the city will have to wait a while yet.

Finally, of course, there is the fundamental problem with A Rough Guide to Glamour. Which is that whilst its contents are interesting, they are not necessarily directly useful. At the time of publication it would be extremely challenging for the Game Master to bring the material the supplement contains into play because essentially, its focus is simply several hundred miles and a fundamentally different culture away from where RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is being played and being supported by Chaosium, Inc.—currently. Now doubtless that will change, but being until playing and campaigning within the Lunar Empire is explored by the roleplaying game doing so with the current rules and supporting material is difficult. That said, for long time Gloranthophiles, this presents less of a challenge as they are likely to own supplements released by previous publishers and so are likely to have the means and the context to be able to explore Glamour.

So whilst a Game Master new to RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and Glorantha, is unlikely to have immediate use for A Rough Guide to Glamour, this does not mean that it will not be of interest to her. It at least provides further context to the current conflict between the Lunar Empire and Startar and beyond, and the empire’s attitudes towards the upstart provinces. Perhaps for that newcomer, the inclusion of a glossary would not have gone amiss at the back of A Rough Guide to Glamour.

A Rough Guide to Glamour lives up to its name, all glitz and showmanship, not to say the chutzpah of including showstopping comparisons between Elvis Presley and the Red Emperor in their last days and rewrites of lyrics to classic British rock songs. It is brilliant  in describing the mythical, mystical nature of Glamour, but there is always feeling that there should be something more to, or at least, beyond that brilliance—and that requires another book or supplement, leaving A Rough Guide to Glamour more the tourist or pilgrim’s guide rather than a full gaming supplement.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. A Rough Guide to Glamour is a guide to the capital city of the Lunar Empire and not only details the greatest city in all of Glorantha, but expands information about the world itself. (Please note: This could be Imperial propaganda courtesy of the Seven Mothers cult.)
No. A Rough Guide to Glamour is irrelevant to most RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaigns and difficult to bring into a campaign without further source material. (Please note: This has been marked as heretical propaganda spread by rebel scum in the southern provinces. A representative of the cult of Danfive Xaron will be with you shortly to assess your punishment.)
Maybe. A Rough Guide to Glamour is a solid introduction to the city of Glamour and provides some context to the actions of the Lunar Empire in the southern provinces. Plus more information about the world of Glorantha is always good. (Please note: Upon receipt of the proper donations, a Lhankor Mhy scribe will be available to read this document for you once it has been located in the temple archives. Unfortunately the requested document is not a comprehensive guide to the city and there are many omissions, or at least, much that is apocryphal. More information may be available at a later date.)

The last thing you should do is say no to a dragon, right? This is a situation in which the Player Characters find themselves in To Free the Storm, a short, one or two session scenario for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Written by Andrew Peregrine, author of The Seventh Doctor Sourcebook as well as contributor to and author of many other roleplaying books, it is an adventure for characters of Fifth to Seventh Level. It is setting neutral, but whatever the setting the Dungeon Master decides to use it with, that setting requires an area of dead and barren land with a volcano at its heart, and a village near the area. As written, the volcano at the heart of the barren land in To Free the Storm is Mawspire Mountain. Now only home to a few hardy mountain goats, local legends say that the region was blasted into lifelessness by a dragon, but since no one can recall having seen a dragon, no one believes the legends. Beyond the barren surrounds of the mountain, the region is fertile, which has drawn settlers who farm the land and loggers who work the forests. One village in the area is Carverton.

As To Free the Storm opens, the Player Characters are staying in Carverton, perhaps because they are en route to somewhere or between adventures, and enjoying a drink and decent food when suddenly, the village is attacked. Which is not that unusual when it comes to villages and adventures in just about any Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy world as it goes. What is unusual is the fact that the attacker asks for them by name. What makes the situation worse is that the attacker asking for them is a dragon! Not only that, the dragon has a favour to ask of them, a favour which he suggests that the Player Characters fulfil lest he continue blasting the village to bits. Which is perfectly in keeping with the attacker—Zzaladar—which happens to be a Blue Dragon.

The favour is this. Zzaladar has long been tied to the area by an arcane manacle, placed on him by a mage many years ago. The manacle is tied to an orb kept deep in a ruined temple on Mawspire Mountain and as Zzaladar has grown in size and power, the effectiveness of the orb has weakened and he thinks that with a little of help, he can break free. Which is where the Player Characters get involved. Zzaladar  wants them to go to the temple and destroy the orb that keeps him prisoner. In  return, Zzaladar promises to not only not destroy Carverton, but also not harm a single sentient creature for a year. Which sounds like a not unreasonable deal—at least for the following year. After that, who knows?

The bulk of the adventure takes place in the ruined temple on Mawspire Mountain. Here the adventurers will have to contend with the volcanic temperatures, the ancient and undead knights of the Order of the Orb who have sworn to protect the orb—and some who have not, and how the god of the volcano, Darmaw, was worshipped before the temple was abandoned and his faith forgotten. The latter is where the dungeon—consisting of just fourteen locations—is at its most interesting. There are a number of elements here which look a little like traps, but may well help the Player Characters in their quest, whilst others will at first seem to be of use, but will ultimately hinder their efforts.

The dungeon offers a reasonable mix of puzzle like elements and plenty of combat along with some roleplaying. Certainly, the Dungeon Master has a couple of fun NPCs to roleplay, after all, what Dungeon Master does not relish the prospect of roleplaying a dungeon? Yet the design of the dungeon is really linear and not all interesting and were it not for the roleplaying elements and how the worship of Darmaw is brought into play, would have little to recommend it.

Available via the DM’s Guild, To Free the Storm is a fifteen page, 2.06 Mb file full colour PDF. It is generally well written, but does need another edit. The cover is nice, but is the only illustration. The map though, is dull and murky, and leaves the reader wishing that the author had drawn it himself or got someone else to do so. This does not mean that the map cannot be used, for it can. It is simply the case that the map is unattractive.

Rounding out To Free the Storm is a quartet of further adventure ideas which raise further questions and suggest as to the consequences of the Player Characters’ actions. Now one obvious oddity with the scenario is that it involves a Blue Dragon and has the Player Characters going to a temple on a volcano. This seems an odd choice, when possibly a Red Dragon with its fire association or even a White Dragon with its icy disassociation might have been more strongly thematic choices. That aside, there is no denying the strength of the set-up to the scenario with the monster coming to the Player Characters rather than the other way around. Similarly, the handling of worship of Darmaw is well done, but unfortunately this is done in an uninteresting, linear dungeon and on decidedly unattractive maps, which all together does not make for a pleasing combination.

There is a lot of potentially good story in To Free the Storm and as the introduction to a campaign of thwarting a threat which the Player Characters were forced to unleash, is actually a good set-up. It would be fantastic to see the consequences of their actions explored in sequels to this scenario as well as have Zzaladar return again and again so that the Dungeon Master can roleplay him as he develops into a memorable villain. Overall, To Free the Storm is a serviceable adventure which feels as if it deserved better, but is still good enough to ask what happens next.

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: Return to the Monolith

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Michael LaBossiere

Setting: Modern era Hungary

Product: Scenario
What You Get: 1.39 MB fourteen-page, full colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A sequel to the classic ‘The People of the Monolith’ from 1982’s Shadows of Yog-Sothoth.  
Plot Hook: Some mysteries are just too dangerous to research for television.
Plot Development: A record of investigating the strange, plenty of research, Hungary-bound, and stone-cold creepy night scenes.
Plot Support: Six NPCs, two handouts, and a minor Mythos race.

Pros
# Simple set-up
# Great set-up around a documentary mystery series
# Sequel to a minor classic scenario
# Suitable for experienced investigators
# Plenty to research
# Variety of NPCs
# Potential modern campaign set-up

Cons# Linear plot
# Too many NPCs?
# Research overly difficult?
# Plot too similar to ‘The People of the Monolith’
# Investigators are known for investigating the Mythos (or the weird)

Conclusion
# Plot too similar to ‘The People of the Monolith’
# Potential modern campaign set-up
# Decent one-shot or introduction to Lovecrafian investigative roleplaying

In ages past, the many tribes of man live, survive, explore, and fight their way across the great continent of Mu. It is a land of savage beasts, of mysterious caves to be delved into and their fabulous gems to be taken, of barren wastes and arid deserts, steamy jungles and wide grasslands, and of jagged mountains and hidden valleys. There are many tribes scattered across the continent—primitive and civilised, nomadic and settled, in villages of wood and stone, in cities of caves and cities of mud brick houses. It is a land of secrets and threats, whether of the ancient Saurians who have long abandoned Mu, but are rumoured to have retreated into hiding; of cultists, priests, and strange peoples who hold dark rites to gods inimical to mankind; and of mysteries hidden away in lost valleys and caves. Armed and equipped with weapons and tools made of wood, stone, bone, hide, and fur, adepts, bestials, fighters, oracles, sorcerers, and specialists work to ensure the future of their tribe. To make sure it is fed and clothed, to protect it from predators and rival tribes, to ensure that the gods are kept appeased, and to ensure that their stories and their legend will be told in the tribe’s oral history.

This is the set-up for Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game, a new roleplaying game from a new roleplaying game publisher. This publisher is Osprey Publishing, best known for its military history reference works and within the past few years, for its wargame rules like Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City and board games like the new version of Escape from Colditz. At the end of 2019, Osprey Publishing again branched out and published its first two roleplaying games. These are Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game and Romance of the Perilous Land: A Roleplaying Game of British Folklore. Of the two, Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game is the more obviously interesting, as it visits a genre that is rarely given treatment by roleplaying—the Stone Age, or Stone Punk. Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game is one of grim survival and mythical adventures in the land of Ancient Mu, one which transposes the Swords & Sorcery genre—the fantasy subgenre of sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures in a world with elements of magic and the supernatural—to prehistory and the self-coined ‘Stone & Sorcery’ genre. In fact, Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game could actually take place before a ‘Stone & Sorcery’ world or after and before our world and history, but either way, the Player Characters are modern humans.

As modern humans in Paleomythic, each Player Character is represented by their Name and Age obviously, plus the Traits, Flaws, and Talents. Traits are natural abilities such as Dextrous or Wilful, Flaws are weaknesses such as Clumsy or Sickly, and Talents represent a character’s experience, skills, and specialist training, for example, Barbarian or Cultist. Each Talent provides a speciality or advantage as well as set of equipment. For example, a Storyteller can orate a story or myth for gain—monetary and otherwise, as well as to alter another person’s memory of an event. The Storyteller starts play with a hide hat, cushion, scarf or feathered cloak, and a pouch of gems. To create a character, a player can simply choose all of these elements or he can roll for them. The more Talents a character has, the fewer Traits he has, plus he can select two extra Traits at a cost of one Flaw each. A character’s initial Traits also point towards his background and appearance.

Our sample character is Solumia, a young woman adopted by her current tribe after being found wandering as a child. Her own tribe was lost under circumstances which she either refuses to talk about or cannot recall. Consequently, there are certain fears and rumours whispered about her, which she fostered as a soothsayer, a doomsayer of things to come. She can be thoughtless when it comes to other people and their possessions, but she rarely sees the worst in others. Despite this, she often seems to be lucky and no one has reason to call her a coward.

Name: Solumia
Age: Young
Background: Faced a terrifying challenge that no others would and won; sole survivor of a calamity
Appearance: Upright stance with a wry smile
Traits: Agile, Brave, Careless, Dextrous, Fortunate, Unassuming, Wilful
Talents: Bestial—Savage (bonus die to resist illness and disease, avoid attacks) Oracle—Soothsayer (Dumbfound target, cause dread, sway crowd), Specialist—Crafter (craft item, repair item)
Gear: tunic, belt, shoes, rushlight, two bags, rope, six pieces of fruit, wood spear, hood, dark linen tunic, black feather cloak, bone knife, fur hat, fire making kit, lamp, oil, pack, flaker, hammerstone, needle

Mechanically, Paleomythic uses dice pools of six-sided dice. The base size of this dice pool is equal to the number of Traits possessed by a character. To have a character to succeed at any task, his player rolls these dice and any result of a six counts as a success. If a character has any relevant Traits, then this adds a further six-sided die to the pool. Talents do add dice, but they do indicate which Trait is appropriate, for example, Charismatic for a Bone Chanter to command a cadaver. Since the Traits are by default determined randomly, this can mean that a character can have a Talent and not have its associated Trait. Conversely, a Flaw deducts a die from the pool. Similarly, the use of an appropriate tool adds a further die to the pool, but this should be rolled separately, or ideally, be a die of a different colour. This is because if a one is rolled on this die, the tool breaks. If a tool breaks, it does not mean that the task has been failed—a Player Character can still roll a six and succeed on the other dice.
So for example, following a raid by a rival tribe, Solumia has joined her fellow tribesmen in chasing after the raiders. At one point, this means crossing over a ravine. Fortunately, there is a fallen tree trunk lying across the ravine—which is how the raiders got so close to Solumia’s village without being noticed—but to cross it, the Game Master asks her player for a test. Solumia has five Traits, so her player will roll five dice, but she also has the Agile Trait, so asks the Game Master if that is appropriate to the situation. The Game Master agrees and the player is now rolling six dice. Solumia’s player rolls 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6—indicating that she has successfully run across the log.Combat uses the same mechanics. Damage inflicted negates a character’s Traits, if only temporarily. A character who loses all of his Traits is rendered unconscious, and should he suffer any more damage, he will be killed. A straight attack will inflict just a single wound, but certain weapons and Talents will inflict more. Armour will negate one Would per attack—prehistoric armour is not good enough to protect more than that, and worse, the protecting armour is damaged in the process and will not provide further protection. Weapons work like tools. They break on a roll of one, but on a roll of six, they provide an additional effect. So an obsidian maul has ‘Destroyed’ as a weapon effect, which means that rigid armour is smashed, soft armour is damaged, but can be repaired, and the target of the blow takes an extra wound, whereas a simple bone knife has the weapon effect of ‘Intimidate’, which means a foe is unnerved and loses his next attack if already wounded. There is no effect if the foe is not wounded or has the Wilful Trait.
Continuing the example above, Solumia and her fellow tribesmen have raced after the raiders and caught up with their rearguard left behind to help the raiders get away. The one attacking Solumia has four Traits—Agile, Dexterous, Brave, and Guileful. He is armed with a hand axe, which has the ‘Pain’ weapon effect, and being sneaky, will ambush Soumia. With four Traits, the Game Master will roll four dice, plus one bonus dice for his weapon and another for his Guileful Trait, for a total of six dice. However, Solumia might spot him beforehand. Her player only rolls five dice, because she has no appropriate Traits. The Game Master rules if he succeeds, Solumia spots the attack and can react, but if he fails, she will be unable to. A result of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 means that she does and can attack this turn, but the raider gets to attack first. The Game Master rolls the six dice for the sneaky raider—2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, plus 6 on the bonus die for the weapon—which means one success. Unfortunately, in response to the raid, Solumia did not have time to don any armour. So she takes a blow to the head and loses one Trait which her player decides is her Agility. Now Solumia’s player will be rolling four dice for her Traits. Worse, the weapon effect of ‘Pain’ also takes effect. This stops Solumia using any bonuses due from her Traits on her next action. However, she can act.Solumia turns and stabs at her attacker. Her player will have four dice to roll due to the loss of her Agility Trait. Worse, she cannot gain a bonus die from the Brave Trait because of the painful blow inflicted by the raider, but she still gets the bonus die from the wooden spear, so five dice. The wooden spear also has the weapon effect of ‘Ward’, which will make it more difficult for the raider to attack next turn and so cannot use any appropriate Traits. Solumia’s player rolls 1, 1, 3, and 4, but 6 on the weapon’s bonus die. The raider takes a wound and the Game Master crosses off his Guileful Trait, and the weapon effect means that next turn he is attacking with just three dice, the weapon bonus die, and no Traits! So in effect, Traits lie at the heart of the mechanics to Paleomythic. In terms of roleplaying, they are a character’s virtues and mannerisms, and of course, flaws. Mechanically, they work as advantages and disadvantages, but they also serve as a character’s Hit Points. When lost in combat or through other damage, their loss both reduces the number of dice a player has to roll to undertake an action and denies the player the bonus which the Trait Seoul’s grant. So a double effect, reflecting the brutal, savage nature of life and combat in the prehistoric world of Paleomythic.

Another interesting aspect of Paleomythic is the use of equipment and its fragility. It is possible to purchase equipment at more organised settlements, but by default, the Player Characters are expected to make their own and repair their own. No item possesses any great durability, but unless smashed or lost, they can be repaired. So as much as equipment or a tool provides a bonus, there is an element of a character and his player investing time in them not just because he can use them, but because he has to spend time repairing them too. In addition, the rules in Paleomythic also cover crafting, climbing, foraging, hunting, trading, trapping, and even locks (though not ones with keys for obvious reasons), all activities that the Player Characters are likely to engage in as they help their tribe.

As well as being a world of savagery and survival, Paleomythic is also one of mystery and magic. The magic is first reflected in various Talents, such as Mystic, Ritualist, and Shaman. So the Mystic can recall ancestral memories to gain the single use of particular Traits; Ritualists perform rituals to produce effects such as curses, famines, fertility, and more; and a Shaman can enter the Otherworld to commune with spirits, but can also repel, punish, and banish them. The Otherworld is a bleak and hazy reflection of the real world, but is also a place of mysterious ruins, forgotten temples, and dead forests where secrets can be found. The Shaman can automatically enter the Otherworld and bring others with him, so providing another realm for the player characters to explore. What there is not is a codified form of magic or really spells, and all of these various ‘magical’ abilities feel rougher and require more effort to enact. 

As to the setting of the continent of Ancient Mu, Paleomythic describes it in broad strokes. This is because it is a continent of the unknown in time where the only information is orally transmitted rather than recorded. So there are no maps that the Player Characters would see and so no maps for the Game Master. This does not mean that the world is not detailed as Paleomythic details elements which the Game Master can add to her campaign. So the means to create tribes and settlements, including beliefs, ceremonies, dwellings, leaders, supported by examples. Some of the stranger places across Ancient Mu are also described, such as the City of Dust, a trade city ruled by many chiefs and the Night Tombs, earth and stone mounds which constrain the treasures and relics of a once-powerful tribe, surrounded by marshland and close to the Otherworld. Numerous gods and how and why they are worshipped are also detailed, as are numerous adversaries. These include potential foes, beasts, beast men, the undead, and more. 

Notable amongst their absence from this list is anything akin to dinosaurs, but Paleomythic is very much a roleplaying game where their presence would intrude and detract from the setting. Notable by their presence amongst the various foes is the inclusion of the Serpents of the Forgotten Ruins and the Toad Things of the Black Obelisk, which both hint towards two of the influences upon Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game, and that is the writings of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Obviously, the Swords & Sorcery element is more readily apparent in the setting, but there are hints of—or nods towards—aspects of their stories, whether that is the Serpent Men of Howard’s King Kull stories or Clark Ashton Smith’s toad things and Tsathoggua from his Hyperborean cycle of tales. So as much Paleomythic draws from the Swords & Sorcery genre, there is just a hint of the Lovecraftian to the continent of Ancient Mu.

For the Game Master there is advice on running Paleomythic as well as possible adventure types—conflict, travel and exploration, and specialist types, along with tables of potential hooks. In addition, it looks at ‘Paleodelving’, the equivalent of dungeoneering on the Ancient Continent of Mu. A few final notes discuss how to adjust the game to fit a more realistic game in the Pleistocene Epoch with human species and to add elements of technology and civilisation to adjust it to the Swords & Sorcery genre. Rounding out the roleplaying game is ‘Captives of the Beastmen’, essentially a cave delve in which the Player Characters must rescue their fellow tribesmen who have been kidnapped. It is a decent introductory adventure, more detailed than sophisticated, but reasonable enough. It does though point towards a need for more interesting scenarios than ‘Captives of the Beastmen’, which hopefully Osprey Publishing will supply at some point—as well as a campaign.

Physically, Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game is a lovely digest sized hardback. Presented in full colour, is well written and very nicely illustrated with painted artwork. A pleasing touch is the use of cave painting-style illustrations which help impart some flavour to the setting. The map for the included scenario is perhaps a little too dark, but that is a minor issue.

There are not many Stone Age or prehistoric-set roleplaying games to choose from, but Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game is a good choice. The rules are simple and quick, pleasingly managing to support interesting and flavoursome characters and capture the savage nature of the Continent of Ancient Mu, whilst the Game Master is given the means to create an interesting prehistoric world of her own. Paleomythic: A Stone and Sorcery Roleplaying Game is a fantastic first roleplaying game from a publisher new to roleplaying games (if not other games), bringing a whole new genre to a forgotten time in a lovely little book.

Since 2013, Goodman Games, the publisher of  Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic has released a book especially for Gen Con, the largest tabletop hobby gaming event in the world. That book is the Goodman Games Gen Con Program Book, a look back at the previous year, a preview of the year to come, staff biographies, and a whole lot more, including adventures and lots tidbits and silliness. The first was the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book, but not being able to pick up a copy from Goodman Games when they first attended UK Games Expo  in 2019, the first to be reviewed was the Goodman Games Gen Con 2014 Program Book. Fortunately, a little patience and a copy of the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book has been located and so can be reviewed.

After having reviewed Goodman Games Gen Con 2014 Program Book, it is clear that there have been changes between its publication and that of the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book. It is slimmer at just sixty-four pages, but as subsequent entries in the series have appeared, they have got thicker and thicker with ever increasing page counts. Nevertheless, the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book set the template and is still a book of bits and bobs, the silly and the seriously useful, an eclectic mix of the useful and the ephemeral, all illustrated with some great art. What is radically different between the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book and the Goodman Games Gen Con 2014 Program Book, is that the silliness in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book begins with the first page! So we have a ‘Gen Con Luck Chart’, a table of prizes and benefits to be rolled for when the attendees might have won—or even lost—when they purchased the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book. This is followed by ‘Bios of the Band’, fun filled biographies of many of the luminaries who were writing and drawing for Goodman Games in 2013—and still are in 2020. They include Doug Kovacs, Brendan Lasalle, Michael Curtis, Brad McDevitt, and of course, Joseph Goodman. These are nice snapshots of the team behind Goodman Games and it is indicative of the strength of the team that they are still working together today.

Art has always been a major feature of titles from Goodman Games—of course, it is with any roleplaying book—but Goodman Games has placed a certain emphasis upon it and its Old School Renaissance style. So it features in ‘We’re with the band’, a look at the band of adventurers whose story has been told through their appearances in successive titles for Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, from the core rulebook and through each of the adventure modules. This is essentially a run of Easter eggs for the observant and adds a nice little level of detail through the series. The we are on to ‘What’s Next for DCC RPG?’, ‘What’s Next for Age of Cthulhu?’, and ‘What’s Next for Systems-neutral Sourcebooks?’, each section highlighting releases then forthcoming in 2013. Most notably, they include two notable boxed sets for Dungeon Crawl Classics, both of them—Dungeon Crawl Classics #83: The Chained Coffin and Dungeon Crawl Classics #84: Peril on the Purple Planet—now highly sought after. This all takes up the first third of the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book. Then we are on to the volume’s adventures.

The first of these is Michael Curtis’ ‘The Undulating Corruption’. The first of two adventures for Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book, designed for player characters of Fifth Level and parties which include a Wizard who has been corrupted by his use of magic, which as the adventure points out, is all too likely by the time he reaches Fifth Level. By various means, this Wizard has learnt of a means to expel the corruption from his body—the Crucible of the Worm. The exact location is up to the Judge, but wherever she places it, what the Player Characters discover is a disaster area, which instead of being free of corruption has been blighted by it, and not only that, whatever is the cause has now left a trail as it heads off across the countryside. So this sets up a chase for the Player Characters to take as they track down a very nasty threat to them, the countryside, and potentially, a nearby city. Designed to be played in a session or so, the scenario pleasingly picks up on a mechanic in Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and builds a good adventure around it. Although it has a specific set-up, this is a good adventure to slip in between longer larger affairs and gets the adventuring content in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book off to a good start.

If ‘The Undulating Corruption’ was a good start, then the second adventure, ‘The Jeweler that dealt in Stardust’ is even better. Harley Stroh’s scenario is designed to be played by Third Level characters is a heist, a raid by thieves upon the house of Boss Ogo, jeweller and one of the many fences of stolen goods in the city of Punjar. Unfortunately, he has not been seen for a month. Fortunately, this surely means that something must have happened to him—probably dead if no one has seen him for a month—and represents a opportunity to grabbed. That is, to break in and steal everything worth taking—or at least portable—and do it before anyone else does. His premises are famously said to be heavily trapped to trick and kill those foolish enough to attempt to burglarise him. The fully mapped building is full of traps and puzzles and clues as to Boss Ogo’s recent activities… The question is, just what has happened to Boss Ogo, but importantly, where is his loot?

This is a great scenario with plenty of detail and flavour. It is a really good scenario for Thief or Rogue type characters, and despite being set in the city of Punjar, would also really work with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set, a setting in which every Player Character is a thief—whatever their character Class.

The third and last scenario is actually a preview for the then forthcoming Maximum Xcrawl. This is one of the most original settings for Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying. It is set on an alternate Earth which was a Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy world and in modern times is dominated by a Roman republic in North America. Like any Roman empire, it has gladiatorial games, but in modern times they take the form of dungeoneering as of old. Essentially, this combines the pizzazz and showmanship of World Wrestling Entertainment with classic dungeoneering and turns it into sports entertainment, complete with arena events. Written for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, ‘What’s next for Xcrawl?’ introduces the setting and the setting’s take upon Dungeons & Dragons-style gaming.

The introduction includes backgrounds for three of the Xcrawl Races—Dwarves, Elves, and Gnomes—as well as a list of Xcrawl Classes to enable players to create their own characters for the setting. To be fair, to get the most out of the accompanying scenario, ‘Maximum Xcrawl: 2013 Sudio City Crawl’, the Referee and her players will need a copy of Maximum Xcrawl. The scenario is designed for characters of Sixth to Eighth Level and showcases the type of dungeon to be found in the setting. It combines game show elements with combat and showmanship—characters can gain rewards for grandstanding—and very room and encounter is a test in itself. This leads to an intricate design for every room, whilst the modern sensibility enables plots to run inside and outside of the dungeon arena and ‘Rules Lawyers’ to take on a wholly different meaning.

Rounding out the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book is a selection of photographs taken on the ‘World Tour’ that the Dungeon Crawl Classics Judges team takes each year around various conventions. These are all North American conventions in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book, but in the seven years since this book, the tour has expanded beyond those borders.

Physically, the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book is very nicely put together. It is tidily presented, the artwork is good, and the editing decent. However, there is a problem with the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book and it is that even in 2013, its gaming content was not new. So both ‘The Undulating Corruption’ and ‘The Jeweler that dealt in Stardust’ appeared in the Free RPG Day release from Goodman Games in 2012 and then ‘Maximum Xcrawl: 2013 Studio City Crawl’ appeared in the Free RPG Day release for 2013. What this means is that if the Judge or Game Master has either of these, then the truth of the matter is that the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book is not going be of greatest use to her. The rest of the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book is fun, but not useful, so if the Judge already has these adventures, then the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book is really just a collector’s piece.

Now the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book did set the template for the Goodman Games Gen Con Program Books to come—Goodman Games having published one each year since. Of course, the format would evolve from book to book, as evidenced by the Goodman Games Gen Con 2014 Program Book, but many of the same elements would be retained from issue to issue. And if the Judge does not have any of the three scenarios in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book, then it is definitely worth her time. Whether she is running a standard Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, a Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar campaign, or an Xcrawl campaign. The Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book is a fun silly book, but its gaming content is still as good as it was in 2013.

In some distant star system, great armada mass, dreadnoughts manoeuvring to bring their massive batteries to bear on their enemies, starcruisers unleashing barrage after barrage of missiles, destroyers darting in to fire torpedoes, and carriers launching wave after wave of single seat starfighters to swarm over their targets to attack pinpoint weaknesses. Energy beams scour away ablative armour, explosive missiles shatter ships’ hulls as nuclear-powered missiles explode and pump their energy as laser blasts which pierce ships’ hulls, freeing oxygen and ships’ crews to the vacuum of space, setting fires to race between the bulkheads, and compartment after compartment is lost… When the battle ends, it does not matter who won, for massive hulks remain, whole or broken by the battle, some still burning or fizzing with freed energy, others venting life preserving, whilst still contain sealed compartments holding the last of their crews, desperate to escape or hoping for rescue. Clouds of energy and radiation swirl amongst the fields and trails of debris left behind by damaged or destroyed ships. The combatants may have gone bar perhaps a picket ship or rescue boat perhaps, but into this scene of devastation come other ships and crews, each bent on other missions. Perhaps they have come to salvage the wreckage, to rescue the survivors, or to get aboard the ruined ships to go in search of data, secrets, or something else… 

This is the set-up for The Graveyard at Lus: A Dynamic Space HexCrawl for OSR Sci-Fi Games published by InfiniBadger Press. Designed for use with White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying, its contents would not only work with other Old School Renaissance Science Fiction roleplaying games, but with other Science Fiction roleplaying games in which large scale space battles take place. Mostly obviously, Traveller, but also Starfinder, Golgotha: A Science Fiction Game of Exploration and Discovery at the Edge of Known Space, and These Stars Are Ours!.

What The Graveyard at Lus does is take a staple of Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy roleplaying games and apply it to another genre—that is, Science Fiction. Specifically, it takes the Hexcrawl and turns it into a Spacecrawl, but instead of exploring a a region of space marked with star systems and planets and asteroid belts, and so on, or the ruins of a previously unknown planet, it has the Player Characters exploring a much smaller area and really, during a particular period of time. That is, in the aftermath of a great space battle. It is a toolkit, but one in which the designer takes the Game Master step-by-step through the process of creating her own space graveyard.

By default, starship graveyards created using The Graveyard at Lus are twenty-by-twenty hex grids. From this starting point the Game Master can roll for or choose the height and width of the battle area, the factions involved in the battle—those suggested can come from White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying or from the new ones included in The Graveyard at Lus, debris fields and their density and degree of radioactivity, what starships can be found in the graveyard and how damaged are they, and lastly populate unique space hexes—for example with a starbase or a rip in the fabric of space. Further tables enable the Game Master to generate events which could occur whilst the Player Characters are exploring the graveyard.

Once defined, in order to help the Player Characters explore the graveyard, The Graveyard at Lus provides the Game Master with expanded rules for exploration and combat by spaceship. Building on the rules in White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying, these cover movement—both realistic and cinematic, dangers such as debris, collisions, and radiation, scanners, weapon ranges and targeting, rounding out with notes on explosions, surviving in space, and singularities. Already included in earlier tables, the new alien species in the supplement include the giant jellyfish-like space-going Dremwan who can harden their skins and eject bolts of venomous plasma; the Koldar are a parasitical scorpion-like race which strip planets of their resources; Neemen are a genetically engineered human species whose egos drive them to become the dominant version of humanity; and the TakTakTak, a four-armed race of telepaths divided into three castes, each with different psionic abilities. Stats are given both races and their starships—or just the race in the case of the Dremwan—but they do feel slightly underwritten in terms of  their motivations. The Dremwan seem written to be mysterious, the Koldar strip planets, and the Neeman want supremacy, but the TakTakTak? No idea as nothing is really said.

As well as updating some of the races from White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying to include the ships they use, The Graveyard at Lus includes several new creatures. Feroozes are magnetic oozes which squeeze through hulls and exude acid break down other species for their iron content; Graveworms feast on dead starships; Space Sharks feed on the energy given off by starships and sometimes their engines too; Space Syrens are energy beings which psionically lure ships’ crews to dangerous stellar objects and feed on their dying life energy; and the Unquiet are space zombies. There is not great invention on show here with these creatures, their parentage being fairly obvious as they are adaptations of classic Dungeons & Dragons monsters. To be fair though, White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying is a pulpy kind of Science Fiction roleplaying game and monsters like Space Syrens and the Unquiet do not feel out of keeping with the genre.

Rounding out The Graveyard at Lus is a selection of new technology, such as FTL Jammers and Teleporters, before it provides a fully worked example with ‘The Graveyard at Lus’. It nicely takes the Game Master through the process step-by-step before presenting it as an example for her to run. Lastly, the supplement provides half a dozen forms ready for the Game Master’s use when she comes to create her own space graveyard.

Physically, The Graveyard at Lus is neatly and tidily presented, though an edit is needed here and there. There are no illustrations as such, but silhouettes are used for ships throughout and together with several hex maps serve to break up the text. The various forms are very nicely done and the tables clear and easy to read.

The idea of a space graveyard is full of possibilities and adventure, and if the Game Master’s Science Fiction campaign can support them, then The Graveyard at Lus is a worthy addition to her toolkit. Indeed, it would also be possible to adapt the concept to the fantasy genre, whether that is on the high seas of the Game Master’s fantasy campaign or in a space-going fantasy a la TSR, Inc.’s Spelljammer. And yet, what The Graveyard at Lus leaves the Game Master to decide is the motivations of the Player Characters—just why have they come to this graveyard in space? And since this is a ‘SpaceCrawl’, what spurs them on to go from one location to another, rather than simply head for the dead or dying ship they want? And once the Player Characters have got there, what do they find aboard the space derelicts? Just a table of hooks and ideas would have been enough to answer these questions and possibly serve as spurs for the Game Master’s imagination. As written, The Graveyard at Lus does feel as if it tells the middle of the story, but leaves the beginning and the end for the Game Master to develop herself.

The Graveyard at Lus: A Dynamic Space HexCrawl for OSR Sci-Fi Games takes a fantastic idea and does a good job of developing it into a solid little toolkit for creating an interesting, and of course, dangerous environment. However, it needs the input of the Game Master more than it should to fully round it out and perhaps a new addition might address the purpose and the destination in a way that it currently does not.

Yesterday I was interviewed for the Grogpod podcast about me and my gaming history, my reviews and editing and so on. One of the topics of conversation was a review I wrote back in 2009, which at the time caused a slight controversy and upset the publisher. Thanks to the efforts of the Grog Squad it has been relocated and I have been asked to repost it on the blog.
Before anyone makes a fuss about this review, please in mind that it was written over ten years ago and the book is now out of print. Further, the publisher and I have a cordial relationship and I had the pleasure of meeting him at Gen Con 50 in 2017. We also have a good working relationship as I first proofread and then edited the rest of the titles in the Age of Cthulhu line. The authors of those books are now friends because of working with each other on those books.
The posting of the review again is purely to assuage my readers’ curiosity and to preserve a little bit of my reviewing history.
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Age of Cthulhu Vol. II: Madness in London Town is the second scenario to be released by Goodman Games for Call of Cthulhu, the RPG of Lovecraftian horror published by Chaosium, Inc. It follows the first scenario, Death in Luxor, set in the same shared world of the late 1920s. Possessing the same high production standards, Madness in London Town comes with five pre-generated investigators, excellent maps and handouts, and a fairly straightforward adventure that can be played through in no more than two sessions of play. As the title suggests, the adventure takes place in London, where the investigators are invited to attend a gala at the British Museum by an old friend. Unfortunately, he is dead before the end of the first act…

Mechanically, Madness in London Town is a better scenario for Call of Cthulhu than its forebear, primarily because it includes the necessary NPC stats and Sanity losses. Yet beyond that, Madness in London Town is outclassed on most counts. Its plot, of a friend’s death putting the investigators on the track of a cult of black druids racing to summon a Great Old One on the right date, is linear in structure and superficial in nature, assumes that the investigators are American and will come armed, lacks the historicity of Death in Luxor, and lacks the sort of historical (not to say geographical) detail and accuracy that many Call of Cthulhu devotees appreciate. The unfortunate truth is that this an adventure set in England written by a non-native, and it shows. Age of Cthulhu Vol. II: Madness in London Town works best as a pulpy, brawns-over-brains adventure, but a Keeper will have to work very hard to make it fit the Classic mode and style of Call of Cthulhu.
To begin with, this is a review of a scenario. There will be spoilers.
Madness in London Town opens with the player characters invited by an old friend, Doctor Vernon Whitlow, to attend a gala dinner at the British Museum. Arriving in something of a hurry, the characters barely have an opportunity to speak to the other guests before the good doctor enters the room and after a few moments’ raving, slits his own throat. Already forewarned that something is amiss at the museum, the scenario’s pull is the mystery behind Whitlow’s death. Clues found at his flat (one thing that the author does get right, as flat is the term used in the United Kingdom) point back to odd goings on at the British Museum, below which the investigators will have a strange encounter with even stranger cats. Even nastier encounters take place at a waxworks museum (no, not Madame Tussaud’s) and at the chief villain’s country dwelling, before the final showdown on Salisbury Plain at England’s most famous monument, Stonehenge.
The cult concerned is a revived ancient order of black druids, using the henge to summon their lord and mistress, Shub-Niggurath. Putting aside the fact that the use of the monument and the druidic faith in this way could be found offensive by some, the plot and cult are both very sketchily detailed. There is very little to either, and apart from the investigative dog work, there is very little for the more scholarly investigator to do throughout the adventure. That the cult’s efforts can be simply stopped by bashing the chief over the head just seems almost anti-climatic.
This being a Goodman Games book, where Madness in London Town does shine is in the quality of its handouts and its maps. It is a pity no map of England could have been provided, as this would have given the adventure a sense of scale and place (or at least shown the distance between its primary locations), and the map of London does feel jumbled. The scenario’s NPCs are nicely presented with plenty of detail, and it includes one or nasty little set pieces – most notably in the waxworks museum, surely a nod to the 1953 film House of Wax, starring Vincent Price. Beyond the adventure itself, Madness in London Town offers a new take on the Milk of Shub-Niggurath and a new spell.
At times, the scenario feels rushed as if the author wants to get onto the next scene. He also rushes into the scenario, never quite setting it up, and it will take a careful reading of the first few pages for the Keeper to grasp what is going on. The inclusion of a better summary would have solved this. The history that the scenario is based upon – the disappearance of a legion during the Roman conquest of Britain – is almost irrelevant, whereas in Death of Luxor, the background is very much part of the story.
So, having told you what the adventure is about and given you some hints of its pluses and minuses, allow me to dig a little deeper and address some of the issues that Madness in London Town raises. To that end I will list them as do’s and don’ts, each highlighting the various issues, before I come to a conclusion. We start with a long “do” before the shorter do’s and don’ts take us to the finale.
Do get your pre-generated investigators right. One of the first things that I do with any scenario for Call of Cthulhu is check its pre-generated investigators – if provided. I do this not just for the benefit of a review, but also out of semi-professional interest, having provided 27 pre-generated investigators for the forthcoming The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion. So I know how to put an investigator together in terms of the mechanics, how to tie him into the story, and how to use history to make him interesting. As with Death in Luxor before it, Madness in London Town has its own set, and fortunately, the five given are much, much better than those provided in Death in Luxor. They are not as broadly drawn and they are not as absurdly pulpish, being much more like something that a player would create himself. They are still pulpish enough, several having daftly, but not ridiculously, high combat and Dodge skills. That does not mean that any one of the adventure’s quintet is perfect…
Let us examine said investigators from the top, then. First, if you describe an investigator as having dedicated himself to archaeology, actually give him some points in the Archaeology skill – especially if you describe him as having authored two academic papers on the subject with the scenario’s lead NPC. Oh, and learn to spell Archaeology, it really is spelt the correct way in Call of Cthulhu. Second, older characters get extra points to add to their Education attribute. Either these were not added to the Big Game Hunter’s Education or (a) his creator really did roll an Education of 5 – which is impossible (bear with me, but the explanation goes like this: base age of character is Edu+6, so his given Education being 8, his base age is 14, and for each decade after that, an investigator receives +1 Education, so at 50, the Big Game Hunter receives +3; so taking this away from his Education of 8 gives a basic roll of 5, which is impossible on a roll of 3d6+3), or (b) the character really should be 14 years old and a crack shot with an Elephant Gun. My suggestion is that his Education should be 11, not 8, and the extra points should have been assigned to his Dodge skill and some languages beyond the one he learned traveling from one end of the continent to the other. Third, if a character is described as having spent his days racing automobiles (among other activities), why does he not have the Drive (Auto) skill? Plus, if the search for answers to the mysterious nature of said investigator’s parents has led him down many dark roads, why does he have the Cthulhu Mythos skill and not the Occult skill? Then again, why does he have the Mythos skill at all? Fourth, why does an author who follows a solitary life dedicated to intellectual pursuits and her writing need particularly high skills in Dodge and Handgun? Has she been dodging the barbed comments of her critics, and practicing shooting at targets in preparation for her revenge? Fifth and lastly, the average of 12 and 12 is 12, not 13 – Call of Cthulhu is not the sort of game where you give the player characters extra Hit Points…
Don’t make the staff of the British Museum look like idiots. You might not know where lions and tigers can be found in the wild, but the odds are high that the staff of the British Museum does, even in the 1920s. If the staff is setting up an African themed diorama, it is unlikely that they will include a stuffed tiger as part of it, since the tiger is found on another continent altogether. Unless of course, you want everyone viewing the diorama (and indeed reading Madness in London Town) to exclaim, “Tigers! In Africa?”
Do get your geography right. I was not personally aware that during the 1920s that Scotland was in the West Country, specifically, the southern English county of Wiltshire. Then again, as an issue it was probably fixed when the Scotland Act of 1998 was passed and Scottish devolution was allowed, enabling the glens of Salisbury Plain to be returned to their rightful place north of the border. The point is that Salisbury Plain is a chalk plateau not known for glens or wooded river valleys, and that could have been ascertained with a modicum of research. Or just looking it up on Wikipedia.
Don’t name one of your NPCs, even if only a minor character, after a historical figure. This is especially important if that historical figure was a leading member of the German Nazi party.
Do get your geography right. The drive via taxi cab from the docks where the investigators disembark from their transatlantic liner to the gala at the British Museum cannot be in any way, shape, or form be described as short. This is even assuming that their transatlantic liner docked in London, which given the fact that as every good Call of Cthulhu player knows, transatlantic liners docked at either Liverpool or Southampton, is highly unlikely because London is primarily a goods port.
Don’t, and this is more of an aesthetic issue, provide thumbnails of your scenario’s NPCs that are cliches and so enable the audience (that is, the players) to identify which one of them is the bad guy at a single glance. It might well be that my partner is particularly perceptive, but she was able to identify the villain of the piece just by looking at the thumbnails.
Do get your geography right. Soho is not in Bloomsbury.
Don’t assume that the investigators (pre-generated or not) will be armed. Many of the pieces of artwork do, showing an investigator holding a handgun of some kind. The England of the 1920s is not an armed England, and pistols are uncommon compared to shotguns and rifles. Further English Customs take a dim view of Americans attempting to enter the country armed for bear, and not just because bears have been extinct in England for centuries.
Do get your geography right. And do check your maps. Like most European cities, London was not built by design, but rather evolved and is not laid out on grid pattern. The term “city block” is not English.
It should be pointed out that the scenario ends with a note about historical accuracy. Here the author states that although he has taken pains to utilize real locations, businesses, societies, and historical events, the adventure is not meant to present a wholly accurate representation of England during the 1920s and that details have been changed to aid the adventure plot or facilitate play. This rather misses the point of Call of Cthulhu, a very, very historical game, played by many not only for its fine elements of Lovecraftian horror, but also for its history. Further, I would suggest that this is very much the cause of so many of the scenario’s do’s and don’ts.
The other cause is the lack of experience that Goodman Games has with writing for Call of Cthulhu. Not just upon the part of the author, but also upon the part of the editor, who should have been able to spot and correct the do’s and don’ts listed above. Worse still, if you go back to the review of Death in Luxor, there is a note at its end from its author suggesting that I look at a preview of the publisher’s next release (which, of course, is this scenario). I did not see such a preview, but if I had, I would certainly have raised all of the issues above, and no doubt some of them would have been corrected. I want to make clear that my tentacular dissection of Madness in London Town is due my wanting the scenario to be better, not an unhappy response to not seeing that preview. My tentacular dissection, though, is certainly the reason why this review will not be quoted on the Goodman Games website.
Long has the roleplayer of these fair isles, by which I mean, the British Isles, suffered at the hands of authors from the colonies. If you are English, Irish, or Scottish, then the likelihood is that you will have read one or more supplements written about your country by Americans containing groan-worthy – if not highly laughable – facts about your country. The unfortunate fact is that Age of Cthulhu Vol. II: Madness in London Town is just one more addition to that list of supplements.
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Please note that I did not mention the Welsh at the end of this review. I could have put them in and everybody would have been none the wiser. I have instead left the error in and proffer an apology to any Welsh reader. Sorry. Please believe me when I say that I did not intend to omit you from that final list at the end of the review.