Original Roleplaying Concepts
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition came on the scene to much anticipation back in the Spring of 1989. I was in college at the time but I still managed to get the books very close on release day. The game was largely an update and cleanup of the AD&D 1st Ed rules. Gygax had been gone from TSR for a while at this point and the rules lacked his "voice" but they were a significant improvement in many ways. But today no one talks about the 2nd ed rules as much as they talk about the settings.
The Game: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition
There is no doubt that the 2nd edition made many improvements to the AD&D ruleset. While Basic-era D&D moved on with the BECMI series, AD&D came here. With the streamlined, but not simplified, rules in place TSR focused on what they believed to be their cash-cow, settings. And to be fair the settings are what we all recall today. There were also tons of splat books and eventually an update that was called AD&D 2.5 by some, but never by the company.
This was also the edition that caved under the pressure of the religious right and bowdlerized demons and devils right out of the system. It would not be till later with Planescape that we got them back in the forms of Tanarri and Batatezu.
Since the Splats and Settings are so important to the identity of 2nd Edition it behooves me to mention a couple and my relationship with them. Not to mention the witch options they gave me.
The Complete Wizard's Handbook
Among 2nd Eds features were the "Kits" or archetypes you could apply to various classes to customize them. Sadly like many splat books you see power creep in these. The Complete Bard's Handbook was one of the worst offenders along with the Elves book. But today is not the day to discuss those. Today I want to talk about the Witch Kit.
The Witch-kit appeared in the Complete Wizard's Handbook and was a mere 3 or so pages, but it was the first official witch class in AD&D. She got powers every odd level and had a lot of role-playing potential. This might seem more powerful than your average wizard, but at the time everyone was assumed to have a kit of some sort.
My world of choice in the 2nd Ed era was Ravenloft. The gothic horror tropes were too much of a lure to avoid. Interestingly enough it would not be until Spring of 2000 when Ravenloft would get their first witch class/kit and by this time they were owned by Wizards of the Coast.
This class/kit gave us the Witches of Hala, which is a kit that any non-magic using class could use, so only Fighter and Theif. But the witches did gain some spell abilities. To differentiate between the two witches Van Richten's Monster Hunter's Compendium, Vol 3 calls the Complete Wizard Witch Kit the "Sorcerous Witch." To further distinguish them I took to calling the Witches of Hala "Hedge Witches."
During the 2nd Edition years, Forgotten Realms was the undisputed King of the Campaign Worlds. I largely ignored it. I have made up for lost time since then and been spending more time in the Realms, but that is another post. I did however know all about the Witches of Rashemen and Spellbound was one of the first Realms products I ever bought. This setting also uses the wizard kit and the Witches of Rasemaar kit.
Due to the amount of material I have here I am also going to do two characters.
The Character: Sinéad
Following my Celtic-influenced witches, I give you Sinéad. Of course, she is named for Sinéad O'Connor whose album "The Lion and the Cobra" pretty much changed everything for me in 1988/1989.
Sinéad is built using the Witch Kit from the Complete Wizard's Handbook. Now the witch kit says they can't be multi-classed, but the concept I want to try is. So I am going to do it anyway, but not choose a kit for the Bard class. Some of the restrictions on this kit feel the same as the removal of the demons and devils; giving the players in-game reasons not to use it.
Sinéad is not a character I played back then, but this build is pretty close to what I would have created back in 1989 while living in Room 109 of the Wright I Hall Dorms.
Goodwife Sinéad
(Goodwife is how you address a witch whose marital status is unknown)
Half-elf 7th level Wizard (Witch Kit)/7th level Bard
Chaotic Good
STR: 12
DEX: 16
CON: 15
INT: 17
WIS: 14
CHA: 16
AC: 1 (Bracers of Defence)
HP: 50
THAC0 (Base): 17
Saving Throws
Paralyzation, Poison, Death: 12
Rod, Staff, Wand: 9
Petrification, Polymorph: 11
Breath Weapon: 13
Spells: 10
Weapons
Dagger
Proficiencies/Skills/Languages
Herbalism, Spellcasting, Artistic Abilities (Singing)
Climb Walls (30%), Detect Noise (40%), Pick Pockets (25%), Read Languages (90%)
Special Abilities
Half-elf: Resist Sleep (30%)
Bard: Spells, knowledge
Witch: Read Magic, Detect Magic, Secure Familiar (3rd), Brew Calmative (5th), Brew Poison (7th)
Spells
Bard: (1st) Light, Faerie Fire, Protection from Evil (2nd) Charm Person, Hold Person (3rd) Dispel Magic
Wizard (Witch): (1st) Audible Glammer, Magic Missile, Shocking Grasp, Identity (2nd) Continual Light, Spectral Hand, Ray of Enfeeblement (3rd) Lightning bolt, Fly (4th) Dimension Door
The Character: Nida
Nida is a character I have been playing around with for my War of the Witch Queens. She is supposed to represent the "other" witches of 2nd Ed, the ones I didn't use but the ones everyone else did. That is the Witches of Hala and the Witches of Rashemen. She is not a starting character because I need her to have some history.
Nida was a Rashmi girl born to poor parents. She was playing when she was taken into the Mists and found herself in the lands of Ravenloft. She became a thief to survive the world on her own until she tried to pick the pockets of a Witch of Hala. For the next ten years she trained with this witch and learned the secrets of Hala and her magic. One night she was hunting a particularly nasty Annis Hag when she found herself back in her homeland of Rashemen. Unable to return, she tried to pick up her life before she left only to discover her family had long since died. She began training as a Wychlaran, or a Witch of Rashemen. Like the witches of her homeland she adopted a mask and changed her name to "Nida" which means "voice."
Note: Since Nida is a dual classed character, a Thief/Mage, there is no reason to assume she can't be a Thief (Witch of Hala) / Mage (Witch of Rashemen) even though the Witch of Hala can't be taken by a spellcaster (she is a thief at the time) and the Witch of Rashemen has to be a spellcaster (she is a mage at the time).
Lady Nida
Human 4th level Thief (Witch of Hala Kit) / 9th level Wizard (Witch of Rashemen kit)
Chaotic Neutral*
(Witches in Ravenloft can't be chaotic, but this is the character concept I have.)
STR: 11
DEX: 16
CON: 16
INT: 17
WIS: 13
CHA: 18
AC: 1 (Bracers of Defence)
HP: 48
THAC0 (Base): 18
Saving Throws
Paralyzation, Poison, Death: 13
Rod, Staff, Wand: 9
Petrification, Polymorph: 11
Breath Weapon: 13
Spells: 10
Weapons
Dagger
Proficiencies/Skills/Languages
Herbalism, Spellcasting, Artistic Abilities, Ancient History
Pick Pockets (35%) Open Locks (35%), Climb Walls (30%), Detect Noise (40%), Pick Pockets (25%), Read Languages (90%)
Special Abilities
Half-elf: Resist Sleep (30%)
Bard: Spells, knowledge
Witch: Read Magic, Detect Magic, Secure Familiar (3rd), Brew Calmative (5th), Brew Poison (7th)
Spells
Witch of Hala: (1st) Combine, Reveal the Weave, Luck (2nd) Arcane Insights, Master Coven Magic (3rd) Water Walk
Wizard (Witch of Rahemen): (1st) Circle, Alarm, Magic Missile, Shocking Grasp (2nd) Dazzle, Protection from Poison, Blindness, Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter (3rd) Firelance, Lightning bolt, Suggestion (4th) Negate Magic Weapon, Magic Mirror (5th) Teleport
I like these builds. I certainly want to use Nida somewhere. Maybe see what she is like with another system. Both are 14th level and have a similar range of abilities.
Character Creation Challenge
Tardis Captain is the originator of this idea and he is keeping a list of places participating. When posting to Social Media don't forget the #CharacterCreationChallenge hashtag.
RPG Blog Carnival
This month's RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by Plastic Polyhedra. They are doing Characters, Stories, and Worlds, so that fits right in with everything we are posting this month.
Check out all the posts going on this month at both of these sources.
Up until 2000 if you said "D&D" most people thought of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition. Indeed it was AD&D that dominated the later part of the 1970s, 1980s, and with 2nd Edition the 90s. Though that is for tomorrow's post.Today I take on the game that I played the most and the one that dominates the imagination of so many still today.
The Game: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
A lot of ink, both real and virtual, has been spilled on the whats, whys, and hows of the differences between Basic D&D and Advanced D&D, so I see no need to spill more here. Suffice to say that they are different games, though we freely mixed them back in the day.
The evolution of D&D from Original to 5th edition sees it's first divergence here.
In the AD&D 1st Ed years there was no official witch class. There were however many unofficial and semi-official witch classes. I talked about the Dragon Magazine #43 witch yesterday but I used it for Basic D&D. The class was famously, or maybe infamously, updated in 1986 for AD&D in the pages of Dragon #114. It was, and maybe still is, one of the most popular versions of the witch ever made for D&D.
The Character: Rhiannon
Ah. If I had a dime for every Rhiannon I have run into over the years.
Not that I can blame anyone. The Golden Age of AD&D was the early 80s and the Queen of the music charts was Stevie Nicks. "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac was released in 1975 on the album Fleetwood Mac. The second Fleetwood Mac album to feature this title, and their tenth overall, but the first with new couple Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. But in the 1980s it wasn't this album or even the insanely good and popular Rumours or Tusk that grabbed me and my imagination. No it was Stevie's solo efforts Belladonna and (especially) The Wild Heart that began my deep, deep love affair with witches.
Rhiannon would be an old witch in my games today. Likely a relative or even a spiritual Goddess-mother to Larina. But today she is the young Maiden who "rings like a bell through the night" and looks for a lover. I can't help think of her as anything but the famous art Elmore drew in the Dragon #114 piece. If she looks a little like Stevie, well, maybe Stevie looks like her.
RhiannonSTR: 11
INT: 16
WIS: 13
DEX: 13
CON: 11
CHA: 15
AC: 9
HP: 3
Saving Throws
Witches use the best of Cleric & Magic-user Saves.
Poison or Death: 10
Petrification or Polymorph: 13
Rod, Staff, or Wands: 11
Breath Weapon: 15
Spell: 12
Saves +2 against other witch magic
Spells
1st (1+3): Darkness, Mending, Seduction, Sleep
Equipment
Dagger, backpack, iron rations, water, 50' rope, staff.
Everything you need for a witch character in 1986I think an updated, and more mature, Rhiannon will need to grace my War of the Witch Queens games sometime.
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night
And wouldn't you love to love her?
Takes to the sky like a bird in flight
And who will be her lover?
Character Creation Challenge
Tardis Captain is the originator of this idea and he is keeping a list of places participating. When posting to Social Media don't forget the #CharacterCreationChallenge hashtag.
RPG Blog Carnival
This month's RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by Plastic Polyhedra. They are doing Characters, Stories, and Worlds, so that fits right in with everything we are posting this month.
Check out all the posts going on this month at both of these sources.
Monday of the first week of the year and it is back to the day job for me. Thankfully I planned an easy (for me) one today. To continue with the editions of Dungeons & Dragons we are now up to Basic D&D.
The Game: Basic Dungeons & Dragons
I have told the tale here many times on how I began with Holmes Basic, but the first D&D I ever owned was the Moldvay Basic Set. I played Basic D&D, just "D&D" to me then, but soon I and everyone else, were mixing it liberally with bits of AD&D. Sometimes I think of the days when a Blue or Red D&D Basic book was used side by side with the AD&D Monster Manual and modules.
Spend any time here and you will know of my love for Basic D&D. So there is little more I can say here.
The Character: Áine nic Elatha
The witch class I am pairing with this is the one from Dragon Magazine #43 and using the guidelines set out by Tom Moldvay on what a witch should be.
Dragon Magazine #43 was published in November 1980; the high point of Holmes Basic, the start of AD&D popularity, and one year before Moldvay Basic was released. The class is overtly designed for AD&D, but as I mentioned we used Basic and Advanced interchangeably. I suppose if I am being true to Basic I should drop the bonus spells per Intelligence the witch gains.
Given the time and this tantalizing promise, I can justify making it for a bastardized Basic/Advanced D&D.
Áine daughter of Elatha is a human magic-user (Basic after all). She is "the path not taken" for me. My first "witch-like" character was Luna, a cleric that worshipped an unnamed moon goddess. While she would later morph into something else, I soon created other witch type characters, Áine is what that character could have been if I had chosen Magic-user rather than Cleric.
Áine nic Elatha
1st level Human Witch
STR: 10
INT: 17
WIS: 12
DEX: 11
CON: 12
CHA: 11
AC: 9
HP: 3
Spells
1st (1+3): Change Self, Cure Wounds, Light, Sleep
Equipment
Dagger, backpack, iron rations, water, holy water, darts (3), 50' rope, staff.
If you are doing this challenge as well please feel free to post on the Facebook group, I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters.
Also, this month's RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by Plastic Polyhedra. They are doing Characters, Stories, and Worlds, so that fits right in with everything we are posting this month!
Do check them out!
For devotees of TSR Inc.’s Empire of the Petal Throne: The World of Tékumel, 2020 is notable for the release of not one, two issues of The Excellent Travelling Volume, James Maliszewski’s fanzine dedicated to Professor M.A.R. Barker’s baroque creation. The Excellent Travelling Volume Issue No. 11 was published in April, 2020—available direct from the author or the Melsonian Arts Council—and continues his exploration of one of oldest of roleplaying settings heavily influenced by the campaigns he has been running, the primary being his House of Worms campaign, originally based in, around, and under Sokátis, the City of Roofs before travelling across the southern ocean to ‘Linyaró, Outpost of the Petal Throne’, a small city located on the Achgé Peninsula, as detailed in The Excellent Travelling Volume Issue No. 8.As per usual, The Excellent Travelling Volume Issue No. 12 opens an editorial from James Maliszewski. This highlights the gap between this issue and The Excellent Travelling Volume Issue No. 11–or rather the lack of a gap, one facilitated by the periods of enforced isolation that beset many of us in 2020, as well as the continuing influence of the author’s ongoing House of Worms campaign. That can be seen in the first entry in the issue, part of the ‘Additions and Changes’ series which examines the various non-human races on Tékumel and makes them playable. ‘Hláka Characters’ adds the three-eyed, bewinged, and sharp-tailed species capable of actual flight. Like many non-human races, they do not acknowledge the Gods of Stability and Change, but when living amongst human civilisations, may adopt one or more faiths to fit in! However, they make for poor worshippers at any temple. Notably, they have a reputation for being skittish and cowardly, but this does not stop the militaries of the Five Empires recruiting them as scouts and even into legions, many of which are listed, solely comprised of Hláka and occasionally as aerial artillery. In terms of Profession, there is no limit in terms of their options, but they make better Warriors than they do Magic-Users or Priests. Alongside notes on Hláka names and homelands, the article includes discussion of Hláka clans—there are none. That is, except for the Blue Clouds of Joy Clan in Béy Sü, an extremely notable exception. Rounding out the article are rules for Hláka flight. This is another fine addition to the series, which with the inclusion of names, makes them both reasonably playable.We got a chance to play the second full session of War of the Witch Queens today, our last day of winter vacation. Today's adventure dealt with leveling up the characters to level 1 and giving them a slight boost in HP. The characters also got the chance to buy some real weapons and armor.
All in the process they learned about the terrible Ruins of Ramat from the villagers of Wydfield Woodfield.
The party searched the ruined church and found their way down into the underground structure where the clerics had lived and trained.
They still need to find the spear and use it to defeat the ghost above. Hopefully, we can get a session in this week, even with work.
The players are learning a key feature of Basic-era D&D. Sometimes it is better to run away.
Since everyone is now level 1, I am allowing the players to diversify their characters. One thief is now an Assassin from OSE-Advanced. The magic-users are splitting up into a Blood Witch, Sorcerer, and Wizard. I am going to let them choose from a common spell list, and then also a spell list unique to each class. One cleric is going to focus on being a healer. So I need to get that written up with some ideas.
For this game, I swapped out my New Big Dragon Game Master's Screen for the Old School Essentials Screen. Both work great.
The tiles are Dwarven Forge and the temple is from Reaper Minis.
Can't wait to see where we all go next!
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.
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.Since 2001, Reviews from R’lyeh have contributed to a series of Christmas lists at Ogrecave.com—and at RPGaction.com before that, suggesting not necessarily the best board and roleplaying games of the preceding year, but the titles from the last twelve months that you might like to receive and give. Continuing the break with tradition—in that the following is just the one list and in that for reasons beyond its control, OgreCave.com is not running its own lists—Reviews from R’lyeh would once again like present its own list. Further, as is also traditional, Reviews from R’lyeh has not devolved into the need to cast about ‘Baleful Blandishments’ to all concerned or otherwise based upon the arbitrary organisation of days. So as Reviews from R’lyeh presents its annual (Post-)Christmas Dozen, I can only hope that the following list includes one of your favourites, or even better still, includes a game that you did not have and someone was happy to hide in gaudy paper and place under that dead tree for you. If not, then this is a list of what would have been good under that tree and what you should purchase yourself to read and play in the months to come.
Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5eArcanist Press ($24.95/£18.50)There can be no doubt that 2020 has been a fractious year and a year in which no subject matter has been more contentious than that of Race. So it was inevitable that questions about ‘Race’ and the stereotypes that the concept of ‘Race’ in roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons enforces would be asked. Does a Gnome always live the forest and have an affinity for illusion magic? Does a Dwarf always have a beard, hate Goblins, and be trained as a smith, stonemason, or brewer? Why are there only Half-Orcs and Half-Elves? On the one hand, the answer is ‘yes’, because that is the way that it has always been—and in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign, there is nothing wrong in keeping it that way. On the other hand, the answer is a firm ‘no’. If you want your half-Orc to grow up amongst Halflings and have led a gentler life, or your character to have an Elf father and a Tielfling mother, than that is equally as acceptable. Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e is a supplement which explores and addresses the issue of ‘Race’ in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, providing options for you to create and play the types of characters that not only break the mold set by almost fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons history, but are the types of character you want to play.
Alien The Roleplaying Game – Starter SetFree League Publishing ($54.50/£39.99)Few starter sets for any roleplaying game come as packed as that for Alien The Roleplaying Game, the ‘Blue Collar’ Science Fiction-Horror roleplaying based on the films Alien, Aliens, and more. A rulebook, a complete scenario in ‘Chariot of the Gods’, a full-colour double-sided map showing charted space and starship plans, plus reference cards and counters, everything necessary to play a game of existential dread and horror in the isolation of deep space, all complicated by the personal agendas of the crew. Not only is the Alien The Roleplaying Game – Starter Set well appointed, it is superbly illustrated, in turns creepy and horrifying, and its mechanics—a variant of Free League Publishing’s Year Zero system—are designed to drive Player Character Stress up and up, first into hypercompetence, and then into panic and dread. Panic and dread that can spread and escalate… Lastly, the Alien The Roleplaying Game – Starter Set can be used to run Destroyer of Worlds, a scenario involving the Colonial Marines.
Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in GloranthaChaoisum, Inc. ($39.95/£29.99)2020 was a great for the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium, Inc.’s community content programme for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and other roleplaying games set in Glorantha. One of the best is Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, a complete introductory campaign set in Glorantha designed to take characters from children through initiation and into their first few seasons as adults among an isolated clan in Sartar. It is also a complete description of this clan and the Player Characters’ place in it, an initiation for the Player Characters, their players, and the Game Master into the mysteries of Glorantha, and more. Fundamentally though, it is a campaign which takes the players and their characters step-by-step into the setting of Glorantha before forcing them into a confrontation with events from wider world beyond their vale. Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is a fantastic introduction to a fantastic world, one of the first titles a prospective Game Master of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha should purchase from the Jonstown Compendium.
FATE of CthulhuEvil Hat Games ($39.99/£29.99)The influence of the Cthulhu mythos continues to ripple through the gaming hobby to spread and warp the options available when it comes to Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. When it reached FATE Core, it did something completely different. It combined the Cthulhu Mythos with a ‘going back in time to save the world’ plot a la The Terminator not once, not twice, but five times! In FATE of Cthulhu, the End Times have come about and the survivors have made sacrifices to Yog-Sothoth to be able to go back before the disaster which befell humanity and perhaps foil its most twisted members in their attempt to welcome their inhuman masters back into the world. Whether it is Cthulhu, Dagon, Shub-Nigggurath, Nyarlathotep, or the King in Yellow, FATE of Cthulhu includes five timelines—or campaigns—which the investigators must go back to and disrupt the five events of which lead up to each of the Old One’s calamitous appearance, in the process facing not just the sanity-draining revelations of the true nature of the cosmos and mankind’s place in it, but also the potentially, physically corruptive effect of being exposed to it. FATE of Cthulhu is a more action-orientated, more direct, and more upfront about its confrontation with the forces of the Mythos and all the more refreshing for it.
Cyberpunk REDR. Talsorian Games Inc. ($60/£45)Forty years after the publication of Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., the classic Cyberpunk roleplaying game returns in the form of Cyberpunk RED, set three decades before the computer roleplaying game, Cyberpunk 2077, also released this year. As well as improving and streamlining the mechanics—still familiar from the previous editions of the game—Cyberpunk RED pushes the timeline on two decades, into a post-mega-corp future where nation states are pushing back against rampant corporate influence, but the world, and the punk on the street, still has to deal with the fallout (sometimes literally) from the Fourth Corporate War. Solos still provide jacked up, cybered muscle and cyber-eye targeting handguns to bring force and leverage to a situation, Media reports and now ‘makes’ the (fake) news, Execs represent cooperate interests, and Netrunners jack in and hack the post-NET world to steal data, sabotage, monitor, and more. Cyberpunk RED provides background, cyberware, streamlined and updated rules, solid advice on running the game and game types, and more to run a campaign on the edge, in a book which will look as good on the coffee table as on your shelf.
MÖRK BORG Artpunk RPGFree League Publishing ($39.99/£27.99)Stripped back to a stark brutalism, MÖRK BORG is a pitch-black pre-apocalyptic fantasy roleplaying game which brings a Nordic death metal sensibility to the Old School Renaissance. At the end of the world, there is one last dark age before all of the miseries come to pass as predicted by The Two-Headed Basilisks in which Fanged Deserters, Gutterborn Scum, Esoteric Hermits, Heretical Priests, Occult Herbmasters, and Wretched Royalty pick over the last remnants of civilisation on an island surrounded by an icy sea and as rotten as they are, make last grasps at heroism and their humanity, undertaking strange missions and tasks from the high and mighty, from The Two-Headed Basilisks’ gothic cathedral in Galgenbeck and Blood-countess Anthelia’s limestone palace, to the fields of death in Graven-Tosk and the barren wastes of Kergüs. From the doomed setting to the ultra-light mechanics, all of MÖRK BORG is wrapped up in vibrant washes of neon colour, splashes of sticky red blood, and stabs of polished silver, in what is an anguished scream of a game.
An Inner Darkness: Fighting for Justice Against Eldritch Horrors and Our Own Inhumanity is a Call of CthulhuGolden Goblin Press ($35/£25.99)Like the superlative Harlem Unbound: A Sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu and Gumshoe Roleplaying Games—arguably the best supplement of 2017—before it, An Inner Darkness is a supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition which explores the darker side human history during the Jazz Age. Thus, the anthology’s subject matters include child exploitation, sexual assault, mob violence, nativism, religious persecution, and racial discrimination, which is why it carries a Reader Advisory and that despite the fact that it also deals with cosmic horror which can drive the Investigators mad. This is an undeniably an adult, or at least a mature, gamer’s book and is unflinching in its treatment of its subject matters. Never more so that in ‘A Fresh Coat of White Paint’ which draws parallels between the treatment of immigrants now and then, ‘A Family Way’ which forces the investigators to confront the terrible consequences of sexual assault, and in ‘Fire Without Light’ that explores the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. All six scenarios are uncomfortable to both run and play, forcing Keeper and player alike to confront the horror of our actual history as well as the horror of the Mythos. They should be no less memorable for either the history or the horror.
Mausritter*Games Omnivorous ($25/£20)Mausritter is a little game about little heroes in a big world. In this rules-light fantasy adventure role-playing game, each player character is a brave mouse adventurer, faced with a dangerous world in which there is threat to mouse-kind under every log and in every bush. Rush nose-first into every situation, and a mouse is sure to come to a short, but nasty end. By being clever and brave and lucky, a mouse can overcome the dangers the world presents to him, find a solution to the problem threatening his community, and perhaps become a hero in doing so. Mausritter is fast to set-up and fast to play—all too fast if a mouse is foolish, or just plain unlucky—and presents a world we recognise from above, which become a big challenge from below when faced at mouse scale. As well as simple mechanics, Mausritter employs an innovative inventory system which streamlines what and how many things a mouse is carrying and brings a clever mechanical effect into play when a mouse suffers from conditions such as Hungry or Injured. The Mausritter book also includes an adventure location to explore and a mouse kingdom base a campaign in. All wrapped up in a totally charming little book.
Valley of PlentyChaosium, Inc./Troupe Games ($35/£25.99)2020 was a great for the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium, Inc.’s community content programme for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and other roleplaying games set in Glorantha. One of the best is Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, a complete introductory campaign set in Glorantha designed to take characters from children through initiation and into their first few seasons as adults among an isolated clan in Sartar. However, the Jonstown Compendium was so good that it did it all over again with Valley of Plenty, a starter campaign not for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, but for QuestWorlds (previously known as and compatible with HeroQuest: Glorantha), but very much still set in Sartar. The first part of The Jaldonkillers Saga, which will take the player characters from the idyll of their childhood through the sundering of their tribe and beyond to its reconstitution in exile and then the efforts made to retake both their tribe’s lands and glory. Use of the QuestWorlds mechanics enables the campaign to narratively scaled to the characters and the campaign is very well supported in terms of its background and setting. This is another great introduction to roleplaying in Glorantha, which takes both players and their characters step-by-step into the setting, its mythology, and drama.
Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the CorpsGale Fore Nine, LLC ($60/£44.99)Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps—or just another bug hunt—puts the players in command of Vasquez, Hicks, Ripley, and others, colonial marines or civilians as they land on and then investigate the strangely empty facility of Hadley’s Hope, looking for survivors, and answers… All too quickly they find out what happened as swarms of relentless monsters from hell which capture you for who knows what reason, have acid for blood, and if not capturing you, then ripping you apart, erupt from the walls and swarm towards you. The colonial marines are trained for anything, but not this and they had better keep their cool and stay frosty in this tense, co-operative, tactical standoff against an implacable, alien foe. The players work together against the board, whether on a bug hunt, or one of several missions which form a campaign. Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps is richly appointed with reversable maps, character cards for members of the Aliens cast, equipment, and more, including miniatures for Ripley, Newt, five of the colonial marines, and xenomorphs. Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps brings the science fiction-horror of Aliens to the table and lets you play out the tense standoff and cat and mouse action horror of the film.
Vaesen – Nordic Horror RoleplayingFree League Publishing ($55/£39.99)Based on the work of Swedish illustrator and author Johan Egerkrans, Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying takes you into a dark Gothic setting of the nineteenth century, one steeped in Nordic folklore and old myths of Scandinavia. Long have the vaesen—familiars, nature spirits, shapeshifters, spirits of the dead, and other monsters lived quietly alongside mankind, for mankind knew their ways and the vaesen understood ours, but as the century wanes, the Mythic North is changing. The young are moving to the cities, the cities are industrialising, and the old ways are being forgotten, but not by the vaesen—and they are becoming unruly and dangerous. As members of the newly refounded The Society, the player characters have the gift of the Sight, able to see the vaesen and despite all possessing their own dark secrets have decided to band together and protect mankind against the threat posed by the vaesen. Whatever mystery presents itself to them, whatever horror or suspense they must suffer, the player characters must find a solution to the disruption caused by the vaesen, a solution that requires means other than brute force. Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying is a beautiful game, oozing atmosphere and hiding secrets for the player characters to discover, secrets forgotten in this very modern, industrial age.
Dissident WhispersThe Whisper Collective/Tuesday Night Games ($30/£25)Dissident Whispers is an anthology of fifty-eight two-page adventures for roleplaying games as diverse as Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, Electric Bastionland, Mausritter, MÖRK BORG, Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, Trophy Gold, Troika!, The Ultraviolet Grasslands, and more, including many systems neutral adventures. It has been put together by an international and diverse range of authors, designers, editors, and illustrators. So it includes ‘Graktil – The Citadel that Crawls’, a hallowed scorpion corpse turned mobile goblin fortress; ‘Snake Temple Abduction’, the partly flooded dungeon home to a medusa queen; and ‘Necropolis of Pashtep’, an Aztec-themed puzzle dungeon. For the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, ‘Hideo’s World’ turns the player characters virtual, whilst ‘Flails Akimbo’ for MÖRK BORG has the player character wake up with their weapons nailed to their hands, and… There is so much to dig into in Dissident Whispers, in truth not all of it necessarily the best quality. However, there are plenty of adventures here that are worth the price of admission and of the adventures that are not worth that, there are many here that are worth rescuing or plundering for ideas. Last and best of all, every purchase of Dissident Whispers goes towards the support of the Black Lives Matter movement. 
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.
2020 in action
MCKENNA: Christ on a bike, it has been a year. Who would have imagined back when we started 2020 with a frivolous piece on little plastic spacemen the grim turn things were about to take? And to think, back in a previous end-of-year mutants communiqué, we were hubristic enough to say that 2018 had been punishing, jejune fools that we were! 2020 didn’t like that and decided to show us what punishing really meant: an appalling bastard physically, mentally, and financially that has put immense numbers of people through nightmarish shit. So what better way to indulge in a bit of propitiatory magic in the hope of a better 2021 than by quickly listing a few of the gems your faithful muties have been fortunate enough to find embedded in the continent-sized turd that has been the year? So Mike, Kelly—what have you two stumbled across in the last twelve months that’s given you a glimmer of optimism?
GRASSO: Richard, first things first: when Jenny and I were going through our own presumed COVID infection back in the spring, one of the things that kept me going was chatting with you early in the mornings, whinging about symptoms, lamenting my suddenly swiss-cheesed brain, worrying about… well, nearly everything. So friends have absolutely kept me going this year, and having you and Kelly as comrades and creative partners for a fifth year has been the lifeline that’s largely kept me going.
Like I may have mentioned, much of everything before our recovery in about June is a bit of a blur, sadly. I did stay sane like many people during the first months of the pandemic by watching, yes, Tiger King, which, by the time it was over, got me wanting to watch an earlier, much better Netflix documentary on the tension created by the collision of cultic belief with American capitalist culture, Wild Wild Country. Both of these, though, paled in comparison to the recent release of Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults on HBO Max, a terrific and nuanced look at the individuals who found themselves so damaged by a society that denied them wonder and companionship that they marched off to their deaths for beliefs that seemed insane to everyone outside the group. People were talking about it around the election for precisely the wrong reasons, I found.
Honestly, though, I haven’t had the attention span for much visual media this year. I’ve been doing far more reading and listening. I’ll start with Carl Neville’s fascinating novel of a sideways Earth where an out of control right-accelerationist America faces off against a mostly-Communist rest of the world (including the UK), Eminent Domain. Its deep, detail-packed examination of a “utopia with dystopian characteristics”—a largely post-scarcity “People’s Republic of Britain” where a 1990s revolution against the CEOs and toffs has allowed an ostensibly classless technologically-driven society to flourish—is a political thriller, a spy novel, an exploration of alternate-history culture and art, and in the character that I identified with most—a young American college student who falls in love with the PRB thanks to its cultural products, art, and music—a simultaneous celebration and warning about falling in love with a place you’ve never been. It changed my life in a lot of ways and I’m unimaginably proud I got together with Carl to talk about it back during the summer.
ROBERTS: A blur is right. It’s almost like I’m existing in somebody’s demented time-lapse photography experiment. These (so far) nine months have been hard and they have certainly changed my life—the extent of that change won’t be clear to me until some sense of normality (what does that word mean anymore?) reasserts itself (or my mind inserts it). With a full-time-plus job in a public university health system and two kids at home who are deeply bored and sometimes furious at the inadequacies of Zoom, I haven’t had a hell of a lot of time or energy for discoveries. But I did re-watch a lot of disaster movies, a genre we subsequently (and rather angrily, on my part) wrote about here.
And we did get some great news in 2020: we signed a contract with Repeater to do a book exploring the themes of reaction and resistance in American film from about 1967 through 1987, and it’s been a lot of fun, as well as a welcome distraction, watching so many films from the era and finalizing the chapter list with you guys. It’s also been really hard, because we have no choice but to leave out so many movies we love and admire. I’m really excited about the final list, though, a mix that’s heavy on genre but also includes a few blockbusters, a couple of documentaries, some exploitation classics, and some absolute gems that have all but disappeared from the public eye. The idea is that each chapter will pair two films that may not have much in common on the surface, but connect profoundly on a deeper level.
This project, as well as the videocasts we’ve done, has gone a long way in keeping me sane.
MCKENNA: Yes, having you two to shoot the breeze with has been good—well, those of you two that aren’t a grumpy, monosyllabic Californian. Naming no names. But this year’s definitely brought home how fortunate I am. Work’s been tough but at least there’s been some, which is more than a lot of people have had. I was sick in March—fuck knows what it was but I’ve never had such weird symptoms (annotated list available on request—really). It only lasted a week, but I was still in a weird state when it finished, because work was at a complete standstill, I spent it in bed, and for some reason it seemed to make sense to devote the time to watching or re-watching a lot of Bela Tarr films. At the risk of sounding a bit precious, it was an oddly therapeutic experience that I’d recommend, if you’re lucky enough to have the time. And even though I’m sick to the back teeth of Lovecraft, have had enough Nic Cage to do me for the next few decades and never had much time for Richard Stanley in the first place, I actually found myself quite enjoying 2019’s The Color out of Space.
Despite the numbing effect of events, one thing that did make a big impact on me was James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art. There’s so much beautifully rendered art around nowadays, but (and it may just be because I’m getting older) it often seems a bit too perfect—so intimidatingly slick that it can come off as strangely impersonal and unaffecting. That’s not the case with Cawthorn’s stuff—it’s like getting zapped with a cattleprod. I read John Varley’s Gaea trilogy, which I started off thinking was everything I dislike about SF but which turned out to be a lot that I love about it, and, prompted by the website Science Fiction Ruminations, I also read Nancy Kress’s brilliant Alien Light, Suzy McKee Charnas’s brilliant Walk to the End of the World, and finally read some Tanith Lee, which was even better than I’d been hoping since I first meant to read her in 1984.
Music-wise, I fell in love with Fushigi, a 1986 album by Akina Nakamori, Caterina Barbieri’s latest, 2019 Ecstatic Computation, which is just as great as its predecessors, and Yasmine Hamdan’s Arabology (after a tip off by fellow mutant Daniele Cassandro). And of course, a shitload of Hawkwind, after a review copy of Joe Banks’s brilliant Hawkwind: Days of the Underground (review on its way, but in the meantime Joe has written us a great article on the band) spurred me to pull out all my old Hawkwind records and blast myself into the cosmos.
GRASSO: I remember finding myself, immediately after recovering from COVID, really needing music on a near visceral level, spending hours listening to NTS Radio and ordering countless vinyl and DVD compilations from Numero Group, getting into micro-genres and musical scenes I’d never really delved into before. That died off somewhere in the autumn, as I began to mourn what really always attracted me to music, and that is the communal experience of listening and talking about it, which didn’t translate into my isolated life all that well. (One of the exceptions was listening to mixes made by friends and artists I love, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.)
But there was one musical experience in that very difficult autumn that did evoke a sense of community, and that was the release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s semi-eponymous masterpiece LP Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. Given the fact that I was already acquaintances with quite a few fans of Daniel Lopatin’s work, getting to share the experience of listening to and diving deep into the themes and symbolism around this intensely personal album was a delight. Lopatin has always acted as a theorist of nostalgia and media history, and on this album, he uses the conceit of a single day on old-school terrestrial radio, replete with “dayparts” aimed at distinct audiences and demographics, to explore his own career obsessions with the bits of our lives that fall through the cracks of a lifetime bombarded by media. Lopatin’s obsessions around our once-mighty collective pop culture monoculture, its historical fragmentation, and its digital afterlife spoke to me in a year where our collective isolation grew more grim:
“There’s a kind of thesis in [album closer “Nothing’s Special”]. It was a really rough fucking year and it’s been hard for everybody. Something that’s always given me a lot of solace when I’m in a funk is that I notice that I’ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise.
Honestly I did find myself revisiting what you might call media “comfort food” at various points in 2020; I did a complete re-read of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy and did (er, multiple) rewatches of my favorite Scorsese films—Goodfellas, Casino, and new entrant to the Scorsese pantheon The Irishman—all those tales of white men behind the scenes in the shadows acting badly, those paeans to what Mark Fisher called a “desensitization [to] capitalist realism.” Somehow those old-fashioned, bloody, up-close-and-personal brutalities and cruelties seemed easier to take than the impersonal mass slaughter going on outside our quarantined walls. At least in a Scorsese film or an Ellroy novel you (might) get to look in the eyes of the guy who kills you.
One other old favorite author who surprised this year was Don DeLillo, whose efforts in the ’10s have become almost like prose-poetry: spare, evocative, sketching the edges of our collective collapse. In his slim but powerful 2020 release The Silence, he imagines the loss of our digital commons on possibly the most media-laden holy day of our American calendar: Super Bowl Sunday. Given the dislocations that coronavirus has wrought on all our senses of time and place (especially in relation to using professional sports to orient ourselves in our yearly cycles and how badly COVID scrambled these collective rituals), I found DeLillo’s haunting novella to be both a valedictory for his own career and for an older world of media and parapolitical action that he has helped explain and explore.
But mostly what got me through 2020 were my friends. As acutely painful as it was for me to be physically separated from those friends for a full year, they invariably kept me sane, safe, solvent, and prevented the worst of the demons from knocking at my door. Whether it was gathering online to play Among Us (I have lots of thoughts on why a video game based around betrayal and suspicion became the year’s biggest hit) or just hanging out in those cursed Zoom boxes, without this minimal level of contact I would have surely lost my mind completely. I started a new tabletop RPG campaign online this year, set in the Weird Seventies, and my players have knocked me out time and time again with their own worldbuilding, character development, and exploration of the game’s themes that have been for me much like a magickal Working. This includes, yes, a mix of psychedelic rock, funk, folk, soul, and Motorik music from ’69 to ’73 contributed by player and comrade Leonard Pierce that was a delight to discover and listen to over and over this year. So thanks to the URIEL team. And yes, the planning and writing of the Mutants book (in addition to the Repeater media channel I’ve been working on) has me excited to throw myself into new projects in 2021. So to everyone who’s stuck with us through a once-in-a-century calamity, who’s submitted their own thoughts to our pages, who has shared or commented on our pieces during this difficult time—thank you, yet again. You’re the reason why we keep at it, why we keep plugging away.
ROBERTS: When I have had a couple of hours to myself, I’ve been rewatching a lot of stuff from the late ’80s and early ’90s, starting with Predator and Predator 2, inspired by Alex Evans’s great piece on the first one. And you know what? I really like 2010’s Predators too. Everybody says Adrien Brody was miscast, but that’s bullshit. He’s great in it. He’s great in everything and people are always saying he’s miscast because he doesn’t look like Brad fucking Pitt. I also love 2004’s Alien vs. Predator—no, I will not be taking comments at this time. From there I revisited a really enjoyable Predator/Terminator rip-off called I Come in Peace (1990), starring my man Dolph Lundgren and, ahem, Brian Benben, who many of you will remember from HBO’s long-running series Dream On. It’s certainly nothing you haven’t seen before, but the chemistry between Dolph, the renegade cop, and Benben, the by-the-book FBI geek, is great, and the evil alien (Matthias Hues) shooting tubes into his victims’ brains to suck out the endorphins (an addictive drug on his home planet) is a nice touch.
Another buried treasure from that high-’80s period is Cherry 2000. I saw it when it came out on video (it did not receive a theatrical release in the US) and didn’t remember much, but it’s got a lot of spirit, and the plot is, er, unique: in 2017(!), a businessman’s sex robot shorts out, and he is so in love with it/her (a Cherry 2000 model) that he hires a tracker (human tough gal Melanie Griffith) to take him into Zone 7 (which turns out to be a destroyed Las Vegas) to find and bring home a replacement. I am in no shape to take on the sexual politics right now, but the film is really colorful and uses a lot of kitschy design elements from the ’50s and ’60s to describe its post-apocalyptic setting, there are some excellent action sequences, and supporting turns from Tim Thomerson (the bad guy, who ends up crucified on a Las Vegas casino sign) and legend Ben Johnson (Shane, The Last Picture Show) make up for the stilted performances of the leads. Director Steve De Jarnatt also directed Miracle Mile (1988), another low-budget cult classic that I watched again and still love.
Aside from research on the book, I’ve read literally jack shit this whole year. My mind can’t do it. Music is an endless loop of the Charlie XCX channel (apparently there is something called hyperpop, and I dig it), New Age ’80s ambient, and anything that resembles the ’80s output of Toto, Rick Springfield, and The Cars.
MCKENNA: I Come in Peace is a fucking rocker, on that we can all agree. And I also agree that Adrien Brody deserves more credit, not least for being one of the few credibly punk faces in a film (Spike Lee’s 1999 Summer of Sam). Anyway, as Mike has so eloquently put it, thank you on behalf of all of us to all of you who have taken the time to read We Are the Mutants this year and anyone who’s supported us in any way, whether by contributing or by commenting, or retweeting, or forking out cash, or whatever—it really is much appreciated. And while I’m at it, thank you two for putting up with me too! With so many going through so much shit, wishing anyone “Happy New Year” sounds a bit empty, but fuck it, Happy New Year anyway!
After Session 0 the other day we settled on three characters each to run through the funnel of The Witch of Wydfield; or rather the Witch of Woodfield as we kept calling it.
The adventure went as expected. I had everyone choose one of the "Basic Four" classes; Cleric, Fighter, Magic-user, or Thief. As they played we worked out what specific class each one would end up being. One magic-user will become a sorcerer, the other a blood witch. A cleric that worships the Moon might go into druid or might go into fighter, but tell everyone he is still a cleric. It's my youngest. That is what he does.
I had plenty of copies of Moldvay Basic so everyone had one. I used my Old-School Essentials book and my GM1a Game Master's Screen from New Big Dragon Games Unlimited.
Since one of my goals is to use as many different kinds of OSR products I can, I think I am off to a good start. Everyone had so much fun they want to play again tomorrow.
I am likely to go with the Ruins of Ramat, this time for Labyrinth Lord. There are also versions for Original Editon, Castles & Crusades, and an expanded Castles & Crusades version. I have not decided which one to use. Part of the fun is converting.
The characters (and the players) learn the first hint of the overall arc of the campaign; cryptic messages from a possessed girl and the moon (no, really) "the Queen is dead!"
No new hints in the next adventure, but we will see.
