I have been wanting to spend some time with the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Compendiums.  I suppose now is as good of a time as any.

In the waning years of the 80s, AD&D took a new turn. Much of the original guard was gone from TSR and a new edition of its flagship game was on the way.  I was at University at the time, so for me, it was easy enough to move over to AD&D 2nd Ed.  I was not playing with my normal group anymore (they were 200+ miles away) and it seemed like a good place to move on.  

It was June 1989 and I was on what was to be my last family vacation to Harrisburg, PA.  We were doing a big Civil War tour and my dad was meeting up with a bunch of guys he served with during the Korean War.  I remember being on my own for a bit and I found a game and comic store not far from Gettysburg. I went in looking for anything new and anything to entertain myself.  Much to my shock they had copies, released that week, of the new AD&D 2nd Monstrous Manual.  I remember talking to them asking how business was for AD&D 2nd ed and they had said terrible that no one was buying yet.  I am quite certain that changed later on.  But that was also my first hint at anything like an "Edition War."

I got it back to my hotel room and I read that book cover to cover.  I loved the idea of the 3-Ring binder and I loved how the monsters were all expanded to include the Habitats and Ecology.  My first RPG love was the AD&D Monster Manual.  This did not fill me with as much excitement (you never forget your first time) but it was close. 

As time went on and I bought more of the Monstrous Compendiums the weakness of the format began to show itself.  For starters you could never properly alphabetize the pages.  One monster per page is great, unless the monster on the back of the page is more letters down the line.  Also in normal use, the pages became tattered and torn; and that is if you removed the perforations right the first time. 

Still, I loved the idea and still do it today. 

Sadly, I sold my original MCs in a game auction about 25 years ago.  I needed room and I had the Monstrous Manual, the proper hardcover that came out later and I was in the process of moving on to other games. So I figured I didn't need these anymore.  Big Mistake...or was it?

I have since bought back a number of the Monstrous Compendiums. I have found them at garage sales, auctions, Half-Price books, and the PDFs on DriveThruRPG.  In fact for less than I sold my originals I have rebuilt my collection and then some.  And I have been expanding.

I have added DriveThruRPG pdfs I have printed.  Dragon Magzine Monsters I have also printed from my CD-ROM.

And since I have been doing my This Old Dragon feature I have had many Dragons that are falling apart.  So I have been adding material when and where I can.  Namely the wonderful Ecology Of... articles. 

I even find material online that others have done.

But many of the old issues remain.

But now I have access to all the Monstrous Compendium PDFs.  So I can buy what I need and print them out as I need.

The extra data is still good and I am amazed about how much of it still works for me today.  I might not play 2nd Ed ever again, instead opting for 1st Ed, but I am likely to use the Monstrous Compendiums in place of the Monster or Monstrous Manuals.

If you wanted to rebuy your collection of AD&D Monstrous Compendiums there are 22 books for a total of 2,350+ pages (figure over 2,200 monsters) at a price of $141.66. (note I might not have all of them)  Then you could print out what you want, how you want and organize them as you like.  I have already done this with Demons and Devils.

I am going to spend time with these over the next few weeks.  

MC1 Monstrous Compendium Volume One

This was the first Monstrous Compendium to hit the market but not the first time seeing the new monster format.  That was published in the (then) new Greyhawk Adventures hardcover.  Originally this came with the monsters on printed, perforated sheets, cardstock color dividers, and the three-ring binder to put them all in.

This product covered some 130 monsters from Aerial Servant to Zombie. It had most of the "usual suspects" including orcs, all the PC races, goblins, and the greatly expanded dragons. The Dragons were the big star of this particular package. They were bigger, meaner, and a whole lot scarier.

The PDF from DriveThru helps this book live up to its promised potential. You can print the entries you want and organize them how you want.  The scans are of the original books/pages so you don't have to worry about a lot of color (you will burn through the cyan/blue though).

A note, like the original Monstrous Compendium this one still has the error on the Vampire page, with side 1 printed on both sides. The correction can be found in the October 1989 issue of Dragon magazine or the full Monstrous Manual.

MC2 Monstrous Compendium Volume Two

The second Monstrous Compendium package was released that to the horror of OCD Dungeon Master's everywhere, you could not properly alphabetize all the entries.  This one covers more monsters, the second tier ones, Aarakocra to Yellow Musk Creeper and Zombie.  It had a solid Fiend Folio vibe to it. 

Any hopes the rumors were false were soon dashed as this set also did not include the Demons and Devils of old.  We would get them, eventually, but not for a bit.

The weakness of the printed copy of 1989 is no longer an issue with the PDF of today.  Now you can reprint the monsters you want AND keep them to one page for fully proper alphabetizing.  You just a need a new binder that will hold 500 some odd pages.

Like the MC1 this PDF includes the dividers you can print.  For my use? I print them out, put them in a page protector and then put some card stock in with them.

MC3 Monstrous Compendium Forgotten Realms Appendix

For me, and many others I feel, AD&D 2nd Ed was synonymous with the Forgotten Realms. It was Ed Greenwood's "Ecology of..." articles in Dragon that gave us these expanded monster listings so the Realms and 2nd Ed are a perfect fit in my mind.  Even if 90% of my own 2nd ed gaming was in Ravenloft.

This gives us monsters from Ascallion to Wemic.  Some old favorites like the Eastern Dragons are here and lots of monsters appeared in the pages of Dragon and Forgotten Realms books, many as 1st Edition versions first.

The PDF makes good on the promises to allow you to organize things as your wish.  This is particularly nice for me since I took some of these monsters and placed them in with the ones above in one binder as all the "common" monsters and then mixed the remaining with the other Forgotten Realms MC (MC 11) for "Realms unique" monsters. 

The scan on this one is a little light, so printing might make some of the pages look washed out. BUT you can turn up your printer's settings a notch to make it darker. Not too much or the scanned paper will also show up as "background noise."  But you can also print them out and touch up what you like with a pencil and not worry about marking up a 30-year-old book from your collection. 

The PDFs from DriveThru are a fraction of the cost of the original and I can also buy a very sturdy binder to put them all in.  The big issue is of course my own printer ink.  But if I ever plan on running an AD&D game again I'll be using these and finally have them live up to the full potential that was promised to me back in Gettysburg, PA in 1989.

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

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

—oOo—
Name: The Yellow DeathPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Batu Bozoglu

Setting: Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Kentucky
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fifty-two page, 30.37 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What if the terror of tuberculosis could be infected by something more terrible? Plot Hook: A brother dies too early and too crazy. The Investigators will have to follow in his footsteps to find out what happened.Plot Support: Detailed plot, staging advice for the Keeper, twelve handouts, one map, fifteen NPCs, and four pre-generated Investigators.Production Values: Decent.
Pros# Interesting historical setting# Self-contained hospital hell# Detailed plot# An expectorantly vile one-shot# Could be adapted to Cthulhu by Gaslight or any time up to the 1950s# Getting in is easy, getting out (and in what condition) is another matter
Cons# Needs a good edit# Illustrations do not always match the period# Potentially overly plotted?# No Sanity rewards?
Conclusion
# Interesting historical setting# Detailed period one-shot# Presents a vile vehicle for the King in Yellow in an expectorantly horrible hospital horror

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: Field of ScreamsPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Al Smith

Setting: Jazz Age Iowa for Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-one page, 9.76 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes the field of dreams is the end of them. Plot Hook: Ghosts on the field of play means the Investigators are going to dig deep.Plot Support: Detailed plot, staging advice for the Keeper, three chase worksheets for the Keeper, two NPCs, one Mythos Entity/Mob, one Mythos device, and six pre-generated Investigators.Production Values: Reasonable.
Pros# Interesting historical set-up# Engaging baseball-themed scenario# Uses the chase mechanics for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Low investigation scenario# Nicely designed Investigators# Potential campaign set-up# Underground city cruelly described
Cons# Uses the chase mechanics for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Underwritten NPCs (especially for campaign play)# Underwritten penultimate rescue scene# Focuses too much on the chase over the penultimate rescue scene# What if the Investigators fail?# No Sanity rewards
Conclusion
# Interesting historical set-up# Uses the chase mechanics for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Physical, low-investigation one-shot into the cruel Earth

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, 13th Age 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?
Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is a campaign for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is a one-hundred-and-seventy-two page, full colour hardback.

It needs a slight edit in places.

Maps and illustrations are done in full, glorious technicolour.

Where is it set?
Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest begins in Apple Lane (as written), but is primarily set along the length of the Zola Fel River in the Valley of Cradles, as well as beyond.

Who do you play?Player Characters of all types could play this scenario as it involves a mix of social interaction, investigation, and action. Ideally (as written), they should have played through the scenarios in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack and thus hold a position of power and trust. Player Characters who worship Orlanth or Yelm will find parts of the campaign entertaining, whilst Helerings will have a high old time of it.
Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is set in 1627 ST after the death of Kallyr Starbrow.
What do you need?
Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, the RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary, and the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack.
Access to the campaigns and supplements, Borderlands, Pavis, Sun County, River of Cradles, and/or Pavis: Gateway to Adventure may also be useful, but are not necessary to run Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest.

What do you get?Imagine if you will that upon his retirement, Professor JRR Tolkien was chosen to adapt and direct Heart of Darkness rather than Francis Ford Coppola, but do so as a Bronze Age myth and do it for the small screen as a Saturday morning cartoon—a Saturday morning cartoon with all of the mythology and the naughty bits left in. If you can imagine that, then you have a pretty good idea quite what Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is like. Black Spear is a truly epic campaign which connects the Dragonrise and the Hero Wars, and does so in two ways. Materially, it will see the Player Characters sent to Pavis to inform Argrath White Bull that now is the right time to return to Sartar. Mystically, it will see the Player Characters involved in the reverberating consequences of the Dragonrise, the ongoing confrontation between Orlanth and Yelm, chart Argrath’s ascent to power and prominence, and rescue him from Darkness—and more. Along the way, the Player Characters will have the wildest ride of their lives, get insulted by Baboons, go to the weirdest and wettest disco they could ever imagine, get involved in Sun Dome politics and heresies, confront themselves, attack and protect a dragon… and much, much more.

Which is not to say that the author of Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is Tolkien in this analogy. Definitely not. Most obviously because in no way is his ego in need of such polishing, but also if we have to have a Tolkien figure, it would be Greg Stafford. Which would probably make the author of Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest here Christopher Tolkien. Which is enough of an ego buff. Anyway, let us put an end to this Tolkien talk.
As written, Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is initially tied into the storyline established in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack, in which the Player Characters defend Apple Lane and one of their number becomes its Thane. As trusted subjects with a reputation for being able to get things done, Queen Leika, leader of the Colymar Tribe, requests that they travel as quickly as they can to the far city of Pavis, and there call its King, Argrath White Bull, back to Sartar. So begins a rip-roaring ride that will take them by air, by river, and ultimately, by means mystical upon their very own journey into Darkness, as well as that of Argrath White Bull himself. In the process, the Player Characters—the majority of them likely to be loyal Sartarites—will be pulled far out of their comfort zone and up the Zola Fel river, as well as deep into the myths of Glorantha. Make no mistake, this is a deep dive into the mysticism of Glorantha.
Throughout, Black Spear is heavily annotated by the author. Here he adds both side notes and asides, references much of his personal library devoted to Glorantha (thankfully the Game Master does not need access to this to run the campaign), gives staging advice for particular scenes, tells you how his players tackled this situation and that, provides references to appropriate illustrations, and occasionally admonishes bad and/or reluctant players. The latter can come across as patronising, but this is a campaign which needs fully embracing by both Game Master and players if they are going to get the most of it and its weirdness. Accompanying this are pieces of poetry, sermons, music suggestions to be played at the appropriate time—everything from O Fortuna! from Carmin Burana and Sunrise from Also Sprach Zarathustra to Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Football Fight by Queen from the film, Flash Gordon, and more. There is even alternative staging advice for each of the campaign’s seven acts if the Game Master prefers not to use some or all of the author’s version of its events.
For the most part, Black Spear is relatively light in terms of stat blocks. They are there as is necessary, but in the main, the mechanics emphasise the Player Characters’ Runes and Passions and how they influence and interact with the story told through the campaign. In fact, Black Spear is fairly light in terms of combat too, mainly keeping it for the big set scenes. (If the players relish their combat, a corollary comes with the PDF version of the campaign, ‘Violence is Always an Option!’, which suggests possible combat encounters in each of its seven acts.)
After all that, if Black Spear is lacking anything, it is advice as to what to reward the Player Characters with. They have just gone on an epic journey, if only inadvertently, and if Queen Leika has no reason to reward them for actually completing a simple task that went awry, arguably, Argrath White Bull does because the Player Characters do much more than simply deliver a message. Another issue with Black Spear is the sheer amount of information and myth which the author splurges on the Game Master. In the author’s defence, he does his very best to make it accessible and entertaining. So whilst there are innumerable references to out-of-print books, these are asides and he always sticks to core sources that are in print or readily available. Further, when the inevitable wodges of exposition need to be delivered in order to impart the degree of detail and depth behind the events in Black Spear from the Game Master to her players, the author provides both staging advice and the means to break it up and make the delivery that much more palatable. 
Mention should also be made of the fantastic artwork in Black Spear. It matches and enhances the cartoonishly epic nature of the campaign, giving it much of its character.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is an unforgettably epic fabulation of  Gloranthan myth which takes a RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign into the Heart of Darkness prior to the Hero Wars. No—Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest is too fantastic a campaign, too much a case of ‘Your Glorantha May Vary’, and perhaps too much information for some, and not every campaign will be running a campaign which runs up to the Hero Wars.Maybe—Black Spear: A Hero Wars Saga for RuneQuest contains much that is ‘Your Glorantha May Vary’ and whilst the Game Master may not want to run it as a whole or a campaign set in Sartar, there are scenes and ideas here which can be explored or adapted as is her wont.

For every Ptolus: City by the Spire or Zweihander: Grim & Perilous Roleplaying or World’s Largest Dungeon or Invisible Sun—the desire to make the biggest or most compressive roleplaying game, campaign, or adventure, there is the opposite desire—to make the smallest roleplaying game or adventure. Reindeer Games’ TWERPS (The World's Easiest Role-Playing System) is perhaps one of the earliest examples of this, but more recent examples might include the Micro Chapbook series or the Tiny D6 series. Yet even these are not small enough and there is the drive to make roleplaying games smaller, often in order to answer the question, “Can I fit a roleplaying game on a postcard?” or “Can I fit a roleplaying game on a business card?” And just as with roleplaying games, this ever-shrinking format has been used for scenarios as well, to see just how much adventure can be packed into as little space as possible. Recent examples of these include The Isle of Glaslyn, The God With No Name, and Bastard King of Thraxford Castle, all published by Leyline Press.

The Pocket Sized Perils series uses the same A4 sheet folded down to A6 as the titles from Leyline Press, or rather the titles from Leyline Press use the same A4 sheet folded down to A6 sheet as Pocket Sized Perils series. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign as part of the inaugural ZineQuest—although it debatable whether the one sheet of paper folded down counts as an actual fanzine—this is a series of six mini-scenarios designed for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but actually rules light enough to be used with any retroclone, whether that is the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game or Old School Essentials. Just because it says ‘5e’ on the cover, do not let that dissuade you from taking a look at this series and see whether individual entries can be added to your game. The mechanics are kept to a minimum, the emphasis is on the Player Characters and their decisions, and the actual adventures are fully drawn and sketched out rather than being all text and maps.

An Ambush in Avenwood is the inaugural entry in the Pocket Sized Perils series. Designed for First Level Player Characters, the scenario has a simple set-up, plot progression, and denouement. It can be played through in a single session and will present the Player Characters with plenty of challenge for that session—perhaps too much challenge in the final scene?—whilst also allowing sufficient scope for the Dungeon Master to work the scenario into her campaign or just flesh out a few details as necessary if run as a one-shot. The set-up begins with the Player Characters about to ambush a prison cart. Inside the prison cart will be Lady Briarthorn, the leader of the resistance who has been captured by the Baron’s soldiers and is being transported to a secret location. As fellow members of the resistance, the Player Characters have this one last chance to rescue her! However, all is not what it seems.

The ambush itself is detailed on the first few pages of the fanzine, including a map and stats for the guards. Once the Player Characters defeat the guards they discover that Lady Briarthorn is not being transported in the prison cart, but rather a local healer, Bernard. Fortunately, he has overheard that Lady Briarthorn is being held in a nearby ruined tower which stands atop a flat-topped rocky outcropping. The tower itself is detailed—or rather drawn in full cross section—on the reverse of the first six pages of An Ambush in Avenwood, so essentially, the second part of the scenario needs to be unfolded and the sheet itself turned over. Here the designer has outdone himself with an entertaining illustration of the tower, its four storeys, and the camp outside, as well as in the rocky outcropping itself. The Dungeon Master can easily run the encounters in these few locations off the one page and barring the need to flip over for the stats for the guards, is given everything she needs to run the second part of An Ambush in Avenwood all the way up to the scenario’s climax.

The final scene for the adventure is quite tough. The Player Characters will need to contend with another, much more dangerous surprise—and no, it is not that Lady Briarthorn is the villain, though she does become a problem for the Player Characters—and perhaps the Dungeon Master might want to reduce or change the number of offensive spells wielded by the true villain of the piece, as a he is a tough customer. The scenario also takes a weird turn here as well, so the Dungeon Master may want to decide whether or not to include those elements if planning to use An Ambush in Avenwood as the basis of a campaign. If she does, then the Dungeon Master will also need to decide on the identity of the villain as this is left intentionally open.

Physically, An Ambush in Avenwood is very nicely presented, being more drawn than actually written. It has a cartoonish sensibility to it which partially obscures the degree of peril to be found within the walls of the tower. There is a sense of humour too in the details of the drawings, obviously more for the benefit of the Dungeon Master than her players. The combination of having been drawn and the cartoonish artwork with the high quality of the paper stock also gives An Ambush in Avenwood a physical feel which feels genuinely good in the hand. Its small size means that it is very easy to transport.

An Ambush in Avenwood is by no means a sophisticated scenario. It is simple, it is straightforward, and that means it is easy to run with very little preparation time. As the first entry in the Pocket Sized Perils series, An Ambush in Avenwood is an easy to prepare and run one-shot or campaign addition which has a charming physicality.

Bad weather is coming through the Dallas area, but it’s coming through after the weekend. In the meantime, the Texas Triffid Ranch Valentine’s Day Massacree and Carnivorous Plant Open House is still set for February 12 from noon until 5:00 … Continue reading →

A missing U-boat! A lost painting! A kidnapped journalist! Ex-Nazi villains! All classic ingredients for a mystery and an adventure set during the nineteen sixties, perhaps done as a film or an episode of an action television series made by ITC Entertainment. Or written and drawn as the plot of a French or Belgian comic, one of those bande dessinée or bédé titles starring Tintin, Spirou et Fantasio, Blake & Mortimer, or Yoko Tsuno. Or they could be the ingredients of a scenario for a roleplaying game inspired by those very same bande dessinée titles. The scenario is The U-Boat Mystery and the roleplaying game is The Troubleshooters. Published by Helmgast and Modiphius Entertainment, The Troubleshooters is the roleplaying game of action, adventure, and mystery set in an alternate nineteen sixties. This is an age of international travel, optimism, and co-operation, in which the Player Characters will solve mysteries, investigate crime, and thwart the evil plans for world domination by the secret organisation known as The Octopus. The U-Boat Mystery is the first scenario to be released for The Troubleshooters.

The U-Boat Mystery is designed to be played by between three and five Troubleshooters. Between them, they should have some decent combat skills and one of them at least, should have the Diver ability, if not the Divemaster ability, as the scenario does end in a dive on a submarine. One option might be to let the Troubleshooters have the opportunity to train before the dive itself and spend any Experience Points at that stage of the adventure rather than afterwards.

The U-Boat Mystery opens with a discussion of the Plot Hooks which will get the Troubleshooters involved in the scenario’s mystery. The four are Arch-Enemy: The Octopus, Do-Gooder, Looking for a Case, and Media Darling, and one or more of the Troubleshooters have these as one of their two Plot Hooks, enabling them to get pulled in from the start. This is a feature of The Troubleshooters and each of the Plot Hooks can be used in two ways. Either as a handout which relates the events of the Plot Hook and can be easily shared with the other Troubleshooters, or as a scene in their own right which can be played out as a prequel for each of these Player Characters, ideally before the opening credits roll… For the Troubleshooter with Arch-Enemy: The Octopus, a widow, Mrs Wallhaus gives him a map of the Sitomeyang archipelago in Southeast Asia, before she is suddenly shot and injured; for the Do-Gooder, he helps evacuate the tenants of a burning apartment block and learns that someone heard shots before the fire and that the only person missing is a widow; the Troubleshooter Looking for a Case receives an anonymous bundle of clues, all seemingly unconnected; for the Media Darling, the journalist—Pierre Martin—mentions that he is off to New York and then the Far East to cover a German marine expedition, but is then kidnapped. The Game Master does not use all four, but picks two to tie in two of the Troubleshooters cast and then their players should do their best to pull in the others into the mystery. Of the four Plot Hooks for The U-Boat Mystery, all of which are set in Paris, one of them should definitely involve Pierre Martin.
Once the Troubleshooters are on the trail of Pierre Martin, a journalist for La République, they will find further clues. These include a u-boat lost at the end of World War 2 on a long journey from Germany to Japan, a painting influenced by Wagner and said to be liked by Hitler on display as part of an exhibition in New York, a marine biology expedition being mounted by the University of Hamburg to South East Asia, and more… It should be relatively easy for the Troubleshooters to put these clues together and follow them to the island kingdom of Sitomeyang. There are side clues which though not key to solving the mystery, will help the Troubleshooters and better prepare them for events later on. These will take the Troubleshooters to Hamburg and possibly Berlin, but whether they travel to either city, or indeed to New York, their ultimate destination is Sitomeyang.

In Sitomeyang the Troubleshooters will need to track down the final resting place of the missing u-boat and then make the dive. The final scenes of The U-Boat Mystery involve them diving down to, gaining access to the submarine, and exploring it, perhaps after having sneaked aboard the marine biology (or not) vessel for further clues and probably during a confrontation with the rival dive crew. The dive and the exploration of the submarine is described in some detail and will require some careful planning upon the part of the Troubleshooters as it is technically challenging and could get them into serious trouble if it went wrong. The confrontation is excitingly staged and makes for a great climax in the mode of the underwater scenes from the James Bond film, Thunderball. Throughout the whole of the adventure, the Troubleshooters will find themselves watched, harried, and even attacked, only adding to the tension and excitement of the adventure.

In terms of support for the Game Master, The U-Boat Mystery comes with eleven NPCs and sixteen enemies—one of whom is weird indeed! Besides the four start-up handouts, The U-Boat Mystery includes seven clues and handouts, as well as deck plans for both the enemy ship and the submarine. Details of the city of New York—including such information as Fiddler on the Roof having just opened, and the fictional kingdom of Sitomeyang are provided in the same format as the city descriptions in the core rulebook, meaning that they can be revisited again and again. Similarly, the new gear kits can also be used elsewhere.

Physically, The U-Boat Mystery comes as a handsome hardback, presented in full colour, with some fantastic artwork done in the bande dessinée style. The handouts are very nicely done—the book actually comes with a handful of tourist visas for Sitomeyang!—though the deck plans of the submarine and the boat belonging to the rival marine biology could have been clearer. However, the scenario does feel as it could have been better organised to be a clearer read for the Game Master, certainly in the opening stages when explaining the various clues. One aspect of The U-Boat Mystery which is optional is its Science Fiction elements. The mystery does involve Nazi fringe science and its side effects as written, although neither is crucial to the plot, and they do send the scenario off in a slightly wacky direction.
The U-Boat Mystery is overall, a very nicely done scenario. Neither its mystery nor its clues are particularly complex, meaning that the players and their Troubleshooters can concentrate on the action and the roleplaying as they round them up and put them together. Every Game Master of The Troubleshooters will want to grab The U-Boat Mystery for her campaign because the scenario is exciting and fun, and the players and their Troubleshooters will thoroughly enjoy themselves.

I love my old school games. No shock, spend any time here at all and you can see that.  I enjoy a good retro-clone. Especially if someone puts a little spin on it as well.  Well, that feeling extends to my computer gaming as well.

Brief history and many of you have read this before. I bought my first computer, with my own saved up money, back in 1985.  It was a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 and I plugged it into a TV.  It had 16k of RAM, and ran at about 900 Kilohertz.  No disk drive. I had to save everything to cassette tapes.  It did have color though and that to me made it better than the TRS-80 Model IIIs we had at school.  In fact it was very much like this computer.

This particular computer was given to me by my brother.  He got it from my old High School DM.  We had the same computer, only his was 64k and had a floppy disk drive.  I would upgrade to the Tandy Color Computer 3 with 128k of memory, running at a whopping 2 Megahertz and a floppy drive.

The computer above though was in sad, sad shape.  In addition to a lot of yellowing it had, according to my brother who is an engineer, a broken pin on one of the epromms.  He tried fixing it, but it was DOA.

So I decided to build my own Tandy Color Computer Retro-clone!  But first I needed some supplies and that case needed work.  A lot of work.

Step 1.  Cleaning and Bleaching

The case was a mess and the insides were not much better.

With some of the grime gone I got out some plastic restore bleach and set it all up under some UV light.

Honestly, I kept it under the light for about a week.  But I can't argue with the results.

Part 2. Proof of Concept 

While that was taking a bath in bleach and getting some fake sunlight I worked on my proof of concept.  I had my youngest print out a mini Color Computer case for a Raspberry Pi B.  I also began ordering everything I would need.  Keyboard, USB cables, new case badges, HDMI cables, a USB 3 port, and of course a new Raspberry Pi 4.  

While waiting on everything to come in I played around with my proof of concept computer.

The CoCoPi emulator even allows me to switch out which classic CoCo processor I can use the MC 6309E or the MC 6809S (my preferred choice).

Got the keyboard and the USB 3 port so those also got tested with the Pi B.  I was able to get the USB 3 port fitted into the old CoCo cartridge slot.  So that was one thing out of the way.

I felt that bit came together rather well.  The next part was a little more involved.

Part 3. The Miracles of 3D Printing

I needed to replace all the joystick, cassette, and serial ports with the 21st-century equivalent, USB. My plan was to route high power draw USB 3 to the side port and keep the back for USB 2.  I also needed to replace the TV Out with HDMI.  Unlike the Pi B, the Pi 4 has two HDMI ports, so I needed to work that out.

The keyboard is a great size, just a touch too small, and no way to get it into the case and have it stay in place.  Plus I am hard on keyboards, so I needed to make sure it was sturdy.  So the first task, 3D print a keyboard tray.  This is FDM print. Our resin printer is acting up and the bed for it is way too small for this size print.

Not bad.  Now to print the ports.

In addition to printing the ports that go in the back of the computer I got some new male-to-female cables for USB (with splitters), and micro HDMI.  Since they were going to plugged in and out a lot I needed to be sure they were secure.  So I also broke out the resin.  Before fitting the new ports to the computer, I fit the new cables to the ports.

USB went in like a charm.  Next the HDMI ports and power cable.  Sadly though, I had to cut the case of the full-sized HDMI.

Though all took a bit to dry and cure.  I was getting close now!

Part 4. Putting it all Together

I knew the hardest part was going to be getting all the cables in.  It was easier than expected except the HDMI kept coming undone.  Still not 100% happy with it.  I had to abandon my plan to also have an ethernet port. It doesn't need it since it has built-in WiFi, but it would have been nice.

Cables stuffed into the case, case screwed back up, time to boot up!

The keyboard lights up (it is a Color Computer after all!) and the DOS box and CoCo emulators work! With that time to put on the new case badge.

Grab some more emulators from my Pi B and fire up my new retro gaming machine!

The computer is running Raspbian which is a stripped-down version of Linux Debian for the Raspberry Pi.  I prefer Ubuntu for my Linux, but this is working out fine. 

To match the spirit of the CoCo my side USB 3 port also has an SD Card reader.  So I rummaged through the house to collect all the old SD cards we have laying around.

I'll load some programs on these and I'll be able to load software on the side of my CoCo just like the old days!

I spent a long time on this, and maybe way too much money. BUT now I want to do another one! I mean, I already have two, the proof of concept model with the Pi B and the full case with the Pi 4.  There is a micro Windows computer out there that would fit into this case and there is another keyboard that also glows red, green, and blue (proper CoCo Colors) but it is white instead.  Maybe I should wait though.   I have always wanted to gut out a TRS-80 Model 4 and make that into my own version of the proposed, but never produced, Color Computer 4.

In the language of the OSR movement, this is retro-clone.  It uses new mechanics/hardware to simulate/emulate an older experience.  I am not running OS-9 (the OS for the Color Computer) and I am not sure I want to at this point.  While the CoCo is my love, I also enjoy the ability to run an Atari 2600 emulator on it and DOS Box.  So I guess my next step is to grab the Gold Box AD&D PC games and play them on this.

One last look at the before and after.

And After

I am very, very pleased with how it turned out.

Now to start trolling some auction sites for a TRS-80 Model 4 and figuring out what keyboard and monitor I can fit into that case.  I already have some old external drives I could fit into it.

Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! is a quick-start for They Came From Beneath the Sea!, the roleplaying game by the B-movies of the fifties and sixties in which the small-town beaches of America are imperiled by Communist crustaceans, aquatic agitators, and tentacular terrors. This is a roleplaying game of bad acting, no-budget budget breaking special effects, inspired by The Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Them!, Monster From the Ocean Floor, and many, many others! Published by Onyx Path Publishing, Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! provides everything necessary for a gaming group to give the roleplaying game a try and perhaps even use it as the starter scenario to a campaign set on the cheapest, schlockiest film sets of the nineteen fifties. This includes a basic explanation of the rules, a nine-scene scenario—the ‘Party Beach Creature Feature!’ of the title, and six pre-generated Player Characters or Survivors, plus Trademarks for all of the Player Characters, Quip Cards, and Cinematic Cards.

Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! employs the Storypath system. A distillation of the earlier Storyteller system, it is simpler and streamlined, designed for slightly cinematic, effect driven play. The core mechanic uses dice pools of ten-sided dice, typically formed from the combination of a skill and an attribute, for example Pilot and Dexterity to sail a boat, Survival and Stamina to cross a wilderness, and Persuasion and Manipulation to unobtrusively get someone to do what a character wants. These skill and attribute combinations are designed to be flexible, with a character’s preferred method being described as a character’s Favoured Approach. So a character whose Favoured Approach is Force, would use Close Combat and Might in a melee fight; if Finesse, Close Combat and Dexterity; and if Resilience, then Close Combat and Stamina.

The aim when rolling, is to score Successes, a Success being a result of eight or more. Rolls of ten count as two in They Came From Beneath the Sea!, rather than the capacity for the player to roll again for further Successes. Typically, a player only needs to roll one Success for a character to succeed at a task, though it can be as many as three, and ideally, he will want to roll more. Not only because Successes can be used to buy off Complications—ranging between one and five—but also because they can be used to buy Stunts which will impose Complications for others, create an Enhancement for another action, or one that makes it difficult to act against a character. Stunts cost at least one Success and a range of stunts is given in the pages of Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! These include ‘Government Trained Sharpshooters’, which for one Success lowers the Degree of Difficulty when attacking a specific target; ‘Always Another Way’, which enables a Survivor to get out of a tight spot or around difficult situation for two Successes; and ‘Forensic Eye’, which grants clues about the aliens involved in the mystery for two Successes. Instead of adding to the number of dice rolled, equipment used adds Enhancements or further Successes for a player to expend, but the player needs to roll at least one Success for equipment and thus the Enhancement to be effective.

Under the Storypath system, and thus in They Came From Beneath the Sea!, failure is never complete. Either a player can spend a Rewrite to reroll; accept the failure, accept its consequences and a Consolation; or if the roll was a failure and a one was rolled on the die, suffer the consequences of a Botch and earn two Rewrites for the Writer’s Pool.

Party Beach Creature Feature! and They Came From Beneath the Sea! uses a number of mechanics which help enforce the genre. Every Survivor has access to a number of Trademarks, each tied to a particular skill, for example, ‘Big Stick’ for the Persuasion skill or ‘Subaquatica’ for Athletics, which can be used once per story. These typically grant the player two extra dice on a related roll per Trademark, but when activated and there are some Successes left over from the completed task, a player can actually gain Directorial Control of the film. In this case, the player can add or remove one detail from a scene for each Success spent in this fashion. A Survivor also has Quips, like ‘I’ve seen some aquatic nightmares before, but this takes the caviar…’ or ‘Not to be nosy, but… do those eyes belong to you?’ When used, they require everyone around the table to vote whether or not their use is appropriate, but if a Quip is successful, it earns a player another die to roll. Further uses of it can gain a player more dice. If the roll resulting from a Quip consists of three or more Successes, that Quip is considered Award-Winning and gains the player an additional Quip and the immediate use of a Cinematic without using Rewrites.

Rewrites are another genre-enforcing mechanic and are drawn from the Writers’ Pool, which is a group resource. They require all players to agree to their use, but with that agreement, a Rewrite can be used to make rerolls or add dice to a roll, as well as to active Cinematics. Five such Cinematics are included in Party Beach Creature Feature!—there are more in They Came From Beneath the Sea!—and these are ‘Call the Understudy’, ‘Cheap Set’, ‘Deleted Scene’, ‘Scene Missing’, and ‘Summon the Stuntman’. One last genre-enforcing mechanic is the Death Scene in which a Survivor gets to make one last chance to impart wisdom, make a request, give a soliloquy, and so on…

The rules in Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! are in general clearly explained and all easy to use in play. They are specifically designed to encourage and support cinematic play, even badly cinematic play, and whilst they are genre-enforcing, there are quite a few of them. So as much as the players need to lean into the genre and their Survivors, they also need to lean into the genre-enforcing mechanics—the Rewrites, the Cinematics, the Trademarks, and more—to get their full effect. This is not an impediment to play as such, but more of a requirement than players might expect of the roleplaying game.

A Survivor in Party Beach Creature Feature! and They Came From Beneath the Sea! has nine Attributes—Intellect, Cunning, Resolving, Might, Dexterity, Stamina, Presence, Manipulation, and Composure; a range a skills, some with associated Trademarks; and Connections, Quips, Tropes, and Favoured Stunts. Attributes and skills range in value between one and five dots, each dot adding a die to a dice pool. Trademarks are equivalent of advantages and Quips wisecracks, both of which grant a player extra dice, whilst Tropes are more personal advantages, such as ‘Hand-to-Hand Fighting’, which grants an extra die when in melee combat or ‘Eureka!’, which means the Survivor is good at putting clues together and can gain an in-depth understanding of a clue once per session. A Survivor also has a Path each for his Archetype, Origin, and Ambition, but these do not play a role in the jump-start, whilst of his three Aspirations, or goals, only the two short term Aspirations really count in Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea!

The five characters included in Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! consist of an Everyman Department Store Clerk, an Adventuring Psychologist, a Disgraced Cop from the local police force, an Everyman Beach Bunny, an Investigative Girl Next Door Journalist, and a Preparation Enthusiast. Each is presented in full colour over two pages with the character sheet on one and an illustration and background on the other. The character sheets are easy to read and the background easy to pick up.

The scenario, ‘Party Beach Creature Feature!’, is set on a hot summer’s night in Darien, Connecticut. The Director will need to decide if the budget of the movie is low, big, or art, and to what degree Exploitation plays a role in its filming. Involving nine scenes over three acts, the scenario begins with everyone on Weed Beach before several fearsome fishmen rise from the waves and attack! The Survivors must not only hold off the attack but discover why the fishmen are so interested in the ‘jazz cigarettes’ which local small-time dealer, Sonny McGee, has been selling. This will lead the Survivors in a most unexpected direction. ‘Party Beach Creature Feature!’ is a short mystery, though with decent opportunities for inaction and investigation, combat and stealth, and it is supported with staging advice for the Director throughout. Each of the nine scenes is very clearly organised with explanations of how the Survivors got there, what they need to accomplish, the opposition they face, and the goal of the scene all laid out for the Director, making them easy to run. The plot is linear, but that is not really an issue in a Jump-start which is intended to introduce both setting and mechanics of They Came From Beneath the Sea! It should take a session or so to play through, which will mean that each player is only likely to get to use one or two Quips or Trademarks at the most. The short length means that, barring the adult element of ‘jazz cigarettes’, ‘Party Beach Creature Feature!’ could also be run as a convention scenario.

Physically, Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! is a slim softback, done in black and white bar the Survivor backgrounds and illustrations. The artwork is decent and captures a little of that beach party giddiness before something walks from the waves and wreaks havoc! It could have benefited from a little better organisation so that all of the content for the players and their Survivors could have been placed together, but if there is a real issue with Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea!, it is that above and beyond the Storypath system, the rules in the Jump-start do add a handful of new moving parts. As good as those new rules are, and as much as they help enforce the genre, what the Jump-start could have done with is a cheat sheet explaining all of them for the benefit of the players, rather than having to explain them more than is necessary.

Although it needs a little more preparation than perhaps is necessary to ready the players for the rules, Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea! has everything the Director and her players need for one night’s session of seaside scares, aquatic agitation, and B-movie budget beastliness. Anyone looking for chills on the cheap and scenery scrunching stagecraft should get ready to ham it up to the horror that comes ashore in Party Beach Creature Feature! A Jumpstart for They Came From Beneath the Sea!

A preamble on the enclosure backstories: Do you ever really think about where your garbage goes? Of course you don’t: you went to college because your parents were on your case about “go to school so you can get a … Continue reading →

Reaching into the box of musty old Dragons I keep under my desk I find this little gem from September 1986.  I was a senior in High School and dying to get out.  I had just auditioned for the part of Dr. Seward in our school's performance of "Dracula."  Steve Winwood and Chaka Khan were singing about Higher Love.  It's fall of 86 and this is This Old Dragon issue #113.

My copy does not have a cover, but thankfully I still have my trusty Dragon CD-ROMs.  And this is one of my favorites.  I had just rolled up a cavalier from the Unearthed Arcana and I figured this was a good representation of him.  This particular cover was painted by Robin Wood.

Given the mustiness of my copy I might be sticking with the CD.

Kim Mohan talks about how he spent his summer, working on the new Wilderness Survival Guide, a follow-up to the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.  We ate those books up in our group.  I remember going back and trying to retcon proficiencies for all my AD&D characters in play, some had gotten to fairly high levels.   These days prefer a much simpler skill system.  D&D 5 is a good example. And many "cinematic" point-buy systems.  In my OSR games, I more or less let my players tell what they are good at and leave it at that.  For example, I'll mention Erky Timbers below. He is a gnome who is an expert on cheese. He gets a +2 on any rolls involving cheese.  It comes up more often than I expected.

Letters cover something timely for me, responses to the Hooves and Green Hair article from Dragon #109. 

The Forum covers questions about HD and quibbles about the Unearthed Arcana.

A nice big colorful ad for the Dragonfire II Dungeon Master's Assistant software.  There is a review in Dragon #116, so I think I'll get into the details of it then and there.

Out big section for this issue is all about Hades, the Land of the Dead.  It looks to square the mythological Hades, a place of gloom but not really evil with the D&D Hades, a land of Neutral Evil.  Bruce Bauer gives us the treatise and his bibliography is top-notch for the time.   Like the nature of the planes in AD&D 1st ed, the article spends a lot of ink on how spells work or don't work, in this land.  There is a bit on the land itself and the various rulers.  This is sort of the problem I ran into in One Man's God, there is mythology here based on real-world myths mixed all together that don't always work out.  Still, though it is a fascinating read and a topic that often gets lost when dealing with the Lower Planes.  The material is still good today and not entirely incompatible with newer games. 

An old friend of the Other Side Vince Garcia is back with A Capital Idea. Vince covers how the PCs can make money becoming business people. I go back to this article every so often because every so often I get a player that wants to go into business.  Currently, my youngest's character, Erky Timbers, wants to hire a legion of gnome artificers to build magic items.  Erky is taking all his treasure and putting it to this goal.  Gods help me if he figures it all out.

Nice ad for the Dragonbone dice roller and the Dragonskin book covers.  They looked cool, too bad they tended to melt onto the covers of books and ruin them.  

John C. Brunnell is up with The Role of Books. Covered are Janet and Isaac Asimov's The Norby Chronicles.  Janet Morris takes a break from Thieve's World to go to Hell in Heroes in Hell. The one I read back then was Diane Carey's Dreadnought! about the Dreadnought class starship in Star Trek. 

Folklore is the topic in Thomas M. Kane's The Tales People Tell.  This is the backstory part of world-building that so many of today's gamers love. It gives examples of tales from our world and how they are used and then provides some examples.  Though to really use this article well you should read Kane's examples, but make up your own.  

Computers are all the rage in the 80s and Mike Gray reviews Ultima IV in Magic and Morality. Gray mentions he hates giving rave reviews since they are rarely accurate, but he raves about Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.  He talks a lot about the morality of the game and even mentions that *shock* you can get through it without a lot of combat!  He makes the claim that this is the closest that anyone has gotten (so far) to a full-fledged RPG experience on a computer.  

Clout for Clerics is a good article to expand the role of the Cleric and give them some followers.  James Yates gives us lesser clerics and man-at-arms followers for clerics and explains why, out of all the classes, they should have them. 

A Saddle's Not Enough by Mike Albers covers the historical importance of the stirrups. This actually helped me on a history exam later in life. 

William Carlson covers combat in the Conan RPG from TSR in Combat Complexity.

Our centerpiece is a cut-out cardboard dragon that my issue does not have.  The CD-ROM has it, but no idea if it is complete or not. 

Ah, now time for a bit of a look into the Way Back Machine.  First is TSR Previews with what are going to be the hot new titles from TSR in November 1986.  The Wilderness Survival Guide is coming out for AD&D. The Creature Catalog for Basic D&D is on the way and wait, what's this a SEQUEL to Ravenloft?  Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill? Sign me up!  We also get the Convention Calendar for September/October 1986.  

TSR Creator Profiles feature the late great Keith Parkinson and the still great Bruce Heard. 

A Difficult Undertaking is our fiction bit from none other than Harry Turtledove. 

Easy as 1, 2, 3 from Rick Swan talks about how to make NPCs more interesting.  This article largely focuses on how to make the best use of tables on pages 100-102 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. 

Larry Church tries to tempt me with better math in One Roll, To Go.  Using his binomial tables he has you reduce the numbers of rolls you need to make.  Nice idea, bad concept though.  Why? People love dice and love to roll them.  While rolling less might mean a faster game it doesn't mean a more fun game. 

Top Secret gets in on the Top Gun craze with military aircraft in Top (Secret) Guns.  My first college roommate was Air Force ROTC. Nice enough guy, but fuck I never want to see Top Gun again. Though that soundtrack by Berlin was quite good. 

Mike Sitkiewicz is a triple threat with his Minimagic article where he painted the minis, built the dioramas, and took the pictures.  See for yourself.

Like many of us, Scott A. Hutcheon loved the Terminator movie (there was only one still) so he gives us Cold Steel, various hunter and killer robots for Gamma World 2nd Edition, with 3rd Edition notes promised.  I can't throw stones really. I even wanted to try out a "Terminator" like future in Gamma World of the last of the pure strain humans vs killer robots I called Machine World, gleefully stolen from the Queen song of the same name. 

Ah some Traveller goodness. Here we get Star Cops! from Terrence R. McInnes.  It is still three years before COPS hits the Fox Network, but if you start humming Bad Boys no one is going to stop you.  This article is also one of the reasons why I don't have a Dragon CD-ROM for issues past 250.  This article is copyrighted by McInnes, so likely there were never any second-run or reprintings allowed.   Anyway, this article deals with character creation for police forces. It actually looks rather fun.  

We get to the small ads. You can cast your own metal minis for just pennies! Get your own custom full-figure character from Avil Enterprises (always wanted one) and ads for various game stores including the legendary Wargames West. 

Tramp was making some news again on social media so it is a bit bittersweet to see Wormy here. Dragonsmirth has the normal silliness, but this issue has extra black mold. Not happy.  And three pages of Snarf Quest.

All in all not a bad issue. Not a completely memorable one. But not bad.  Though I am going to need to double up on the Benadryl after this one. 

A couple of weeks back I noticed a posting in one of the Greyhawk groups on Facebook about a new adventure. It was called The Witch-Queen's Lament so you know it immediately had my attention. The adventure was designed for OSRIC and had an old-school module look and feel to it.  I didn't know much about it to be honest, but I was sure I was going to get it.  I went over the publisher's website, casl Entertainment, and bought a copy of the PDF and perfect bound softcover.  While I was predisposed to like it, getting the PDF made me quite excited for it.

The Witch-Queen’s Lament

An adventure for character levels 6-9 (70,002 total experience points) for OSRIC or compatible games. PDF and softcover available, 95 pages.

This adventure is "compliant" (I think "compatible" is the word they want, it is "compliant" with the OGL) with OSRIC.  This really means it can (read should) be used with AD&D 1st Edition.  It will work with other games too, but more on that.

This adventure is designed for Tournament play. That is why we have the 70,002 XP value on it and there is a tournament scoring sheet.  IF you wish to play this adventure with tournament rules and scoring my advice is do not change anything about it.  I have run a few tournament adventures with scoring and this one feels like it put together well. My concern would only be can you fit it into the four-hour time slot?  I am 100% certain that author Carlos A.S. Lising has and has done so many times.  I am not sure *I* could do it.  That all being said I want to look at this from the point of view of a campaign, and my War of the Witch Queens campaign in particular. 

So let's start back at the beginning.  This adventure was the official Tourneyment adventure for GrogCon 2021.  Looking over their catalog it looks like they have run a few adventures at other old-school cons as well.  This bodes well.  The adventure was written by Carlos A.S. Lising, with cover and interior art by Daniel Govar, and cartography from Glynn Seal.  Carlos A.S. Lising is a huge fan of module S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth which is also one of my favorites. This makes me optimistic for this adventure.

Now when this was announced for sale there was a little bit of wailing from the usual suspects in regard to the module code, G2, on the cover.  With many complaining that this was not really G2.  Sorry but the TSR G2 The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl is over 40 years old now and neither TSR nor Gygax owned the letter G.  I am sure the G, in this case, stood for "GrogCon."  If this bugs you, be like Elsa and let it go.

On to the adventure proper.  We learn right away that the eponymous Witch-Queen is none other than "Natasha the Dark" aka Tasha, aka Tashanna, aka Zyblina, aka Iggwilv herself!  Ok. You now have my undivided attention.  We get a bit of backstory on Natasha the Dark including her becoming a Daughter of Baba Yaga, and her sisters Vasilisa (Elena) the Fair and Anya the Plain.  Anya is going to be our focus here since she has gone missing with Natasha's matryoshka doll. This was no ordinary doll, this nesting doll held a bit of Natasha's soul/life force and has kept her immortal for centuries.  Natasha, it a bit uncharacteristic token of love, gave the newly enchanted doll to Anya for safe-keeping, knowing her sister would love it and cherish it. The side effect has been that as long as Anya has the doll she will also be immortal, just stuck in the form of a 12-year-old girl.

The doll, and Anya, has now been stolen and IggwilvNatasha needs you all to get it back.

As far as adventure hooks goes this one is a good one.  The doll is in the hands of an evil Wizard named Andrei Anazinov who knows it is special and knows Anya has never aged. He trying to discover its secrets.  So get the doll before the wizard figures out Natasha's immortality.  The adventure overtly makes it about saving Natasha's immortality, but as you read it the real reason is also uncovered, the ancient Witch Queen still loves her little sister. Undoing the immortality would be bad for Natasha, but it is also likely she has many safeguards in place.  It would however kill Anya outright.

I don't want to go too much deeper than this in case potential players read this.  It is a MacGuffin search, but a fun one and a chance to interact with one of the more notorious characters in D&D lore.

Comments on the Adventure

A few comments.  I can completely understand why Natasha wants the doll and Anya back.  I even understand why she wants good adventurers to do it.  I am not sure why someone of Natasha's caliber would a. let the adventurers know who she is and b. what the doll is.  It seems to me that good or evil the party might want to hide or destroy the doll to stop an evil witch queen.  When I run this I am going to need another reason.

The maps are great. I am glad I have to PDF to print them out on my own.

There are some cool new monsters (a must in any adventure) and magic items.  There is even a pronunciation guide. 

One nitpick. None of the pages have page numbers on them. Seems a touch odd, but I can deal.

Sixteen pages are given over to the 8 pre-gen characters.  So that is nice.  There are also tournament scoring sheets.

Adapting for War of the Witch Queens

I bought this adventure with idea of adapting it over to my War of the Witch Queen campaign.  This is not the first "Witch Queen" adventure I have bought, nor will it be my last I am sure.   The fact that it includes Natasha/Iggwilv just makes it more perfect to be honest.

So here are my changes.

I am not running this as a tournament since I am going to be using OSE-Advanced Fantasy for it. There will be some more tweaks for the rules, but I think it is going to work out just fantastic really.

Natasha/Iggwilv is not going to let the adventurers know who she is or why she wants the doll back.  I am going to have her disguise herself as Elena the Fair and "Elena" will be hiring them to rescue her sister Anya. This way she feels she is not lying about her mission.  In the end, Anya will out "Elena" as Iggwilv, but the terms of their agreement will remain.  Maybe Vasilisa the Beautiful will show up to take Anya.  I have Elena and Vasilisa as two separate characters. 

I love the whole Russian feel to all of this, but I am going to take out Andrei Anazinov and replace him with Kelek.  Kelek has had some dealings with Iggwilv already and he is the "big bad" of the War of the Witch Queens.  I need an adventure to get him in front of the PCs instead of making him a behind the shadows guy.  Andrei is a 14th level wizard. I made Kelek a 15th level magic-user/necromancer.  Also in my games Kelek is looking for ways to make himself ever young, he thinks Anya (not the doll) is the answer.  Kelek is a misanthrope, so kidnapping and experimenting on a little kid is kinda on-brand for him So this all fits.  

Plus I have these great minis to use. 

There might be other little tweaks along the way. More winter wolves and worgs to be sure. I am certainly going to steal ideas from the newer 5e versions of Iggwilv and Kelek and I am also going to steal ideas from the Pathfinder Witch War series.

There are more adventures on the casl Entertainment website. Including one, C11 - When Comes the Witching Hour, that looks like it could be Iggwilv on the cover.  So I am going to need to check that one out as well.  Just watched this video and yup, looks like it is! I have to go get it now.

Ty Matejowsky / February 9, 2022

By now, dead shopping malls are as much a part of the popular imagination as they are blighted fixtures of suburban landscapes: sprawling vestiges of a bygone era when droves of consumers flocked to self-contained hubs of retail commerce, embracing late stage capitalism’s aspirational promises, seeking distraction from the inertia of edge-city ennui. Today, abandoned shopping malls haunt spaces of modernity in ways both real and notional, leaving baby boomers and Gen-Xers to confront varying levels of nostalgia and angst as memories of frequenting the enclosed facilities during their halcyon heyday collide with the stark realities of their prolonged and seemingly irreversible decline.

Doubtless, part of the sentimentality surrounding this emergent “mallstalgia” is the conspicuous foregrounding of multi-tier shopping centers in recent popular culture, including Stranger Things Season 3 (2019) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). Such depictions—what with their gleaming chrome surfaces, pastel-tinged aesthetics, and requisite new wave needle-drops—exert an outsized influence over how we (mis)remember indoor malls, never mind the commercial primacy and unique subcultures (e.g., mall rats, mall walkers) they once engendered. Amid such vivid renderings, it’s instructive to revisit contemporaneous accounts of mall life published at the height of their 1980s popularity, if for no other reason than to avoid overly romanticizing or essentializing these prevailing generational touchstones.

Notable among these is sociologist Jerry Jacobs’s slender 1984 monograph The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life, which makes for some curious if occasionally vexing reading nearly 40 years after its initial publication. Boasting perhaps the least inspiring cover image of all time—a blurry black and white photo of a giant concrete planter sitting amid the half-shadows of a nondescript mall interior—the book came out as part of Waveland Press’s Case Studies, a multivolume academic series familiar to most ‘70s and ‘80s anthropology students.

In The Mall, Jacobs trades the indigenous societies and far-flung research locales of his series peers for the apparently pseudonymous Oldtown Shoptime Mall, an L-shaped, 750,000 square foot retail venue built in 1975, housing some 115 individual stores, and presumably located in upstate New York near his home institution of Syracuse University. Like most other early ‘80s malls, the Oldtown featured a healthy mix of retail and entertainment offerings: video arcades, banks, restaurants, department stores, and specialty shops selling jewelry, music, shoes, men’s/women’s/children’s apparel, sporting goods, books, greeting cards, and gifts. Local teenagers, housewives, and retirees are among those Jacobs identifies as frequent mall-goers, their comings and goings overseen by management staff and minimum wage-earning security guards.

Jacobs’s stated aim is to present “a documentary and ethnographic study of shopping malls in the United States and their profound influence on transforming our urban and suburban landscapes.” He largely achieves this objective when discussing things like tenant composition, mall security measures, and crime statistics (it is employees and not shoplifters who inflict the most “shrinkage,” or store inventory losses). More effective is when he documents the attitudes and behaviors of mall denizens, capturing in sometimes granular detail the ephemera of their casual conversations and social interactions. To wit, Jacobs records some bored high schoolers detailing what they find “weird” in other mall guests (“people who do their hair weird, wear dumb clothes, or wear ‘high waters’”).

Less productive are Jacobs’s attempts to situate his findings within established theoretical concepts. For example, he argues that the social life of shopping malls approaches Durkheim’s “society of saints.” That is, since “nothing unusual is happening” at malls, any untoward teenage or adult behavior, however slight, is unduly magnified and labeled deviant. Unlike the aberrant behavior that he associates with downtown business districts and their various “stigmatized persons” (“vagrants, drunks, prostitutes, street people, ex-mental patients, the retarded, or many blacks and ethnics”), the threshold for appropriate shopping mall behavior is so high, according to Jacobs, that any misstep can invite serious reprimand or sanction.

He further critiques malls by arguing that those frequenting them indulge in what he terms a “shrinking world,” a place where people seek out “a wide range of diversions, e.g., T.V., video games, the ‘walkman’ craze, alcohol, drugs, transcendental meditation, mental illness, art, science or rubic [sic] cubes” to avoid interpersonal interactions and escape the tedium of everyday life. For Jacobs, shopping malls remain places where the tacit promises of social transcendence and personal gratification ultimately go unfulfilled. If these assertions seem a bit tentative or lacking rigor, then readers had best brace themselves for the gratuitous editorializing and anecdotal asides that Jacobs deploys throughout The Mall. The book is chock full of strange digressions that only tangentially relate to its stated research aims.

For instance, when theorizing why shopping malls lack adequate restrooms, Jacobs suggests that they not only serve as potential sites of “crime against persons” but also “other sorts of offences such as ‘tea room trades’ (casual homosexual activities in public restrooms),” adding, inexplicably, that “the author [Jacobs] inadvertently blundered in on a situation of this sort in the restroom of an upper-class department store that anchored one end of a large shopping mall in Northern California.” Similarly, he devotes considerable pages to the perceived socio-psychological effects of coin-operated arcade machines on impressionable ‘80s youth. When addressing the future implications of adolescents spending so much time in mall arcades, Jacobs assumes the moral panic posturing of then U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, who said in 1982: “Their body language is tremendous and everything is Zap the enemy. There’s nothing constructive in the video games.” As if to further challenge the legitimacy of video games, Jacobs then relates how an Oldtown Shoptime Mall arcade was moved from its original location near a mall entrance to a less accessible area within the shopping center’s basement owing to the actions and threatening presence of “lower class black and white teenagers,” “dope dealers,” and other “undesirables.”

Such finger-wagging gives way to hyperbole and heavy-handedness in the book’s final section. Here, Jacobs drops any pretense at understatement, arguing, for example, that the “promised safety, comfort, and entertainment” of malls are on a “scale [that] has not been seen since the court at Versailles.” No less excessive is the book’s curveball ending. On the last two pages Jacobs warns against seeking escape in things like shopping malls by abruptly recounting the tragic 1983 news story of a 13-year-old California boy who killed himself after his father removed a bedroom television to prevent him from binging soap operas.

So, what to make of this obscure bit of academic ephemera? How should 21st century readers approach what is arguably the first in-depth account of American mall culture compiled by a social scientist, never mind one that inexplicably ends with a teen suicide note. Does this flawed account of a once novel topic of ethnographic inquiry add any new dimension or counterweight to the generalized and deepening nostalgia gaining currency nowadays across popular culture? In considering such questions, it may prove useful to juxtapose this on-the-ground snapshot of early ‘80s mall life with another critique of American modernity, one also suffused with an underlying sense of dread that showcases the ultimate emptiness of Reagan-era consumerism and media information overload. That is to say, The Mall can and maybe should be read as an addendum or companion piece to Don DeLillo’s darkly comic novel White Noise (1985), the story of Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney and his fourth wife Babette searching for meaning amid a stitched-together family of children from previous marriages, a drug that suppresses the fear of death (Dylar), and an “airborne toxic event” that completely upends their middle-class existence.

A central setting of White Noise—a book itself with no shortage of digressions and seemingly pointless anecdotes—is the ten-story Mid-Village Mall (“a vast shopping center out on the interstate”) where, encouraged by his wife and (step)children, Jack spends an evening roaming fugue-like from store to store buying stuff he doesn’t need, and then driving home in contemplative silence. So immense is the Mid-Village Mall, in fact, that an elderly couple gets lost for two days among its vaulted interior spaces, eventually taking refuge in “an abandoned cookie shack,” before finally being discovered “alive but shaken.” As a sociological primer for the themes DeLillo more trenchantly explores in White Noise, The Mall provides some real-life observations grounded in ethnographic fieldwork. Read together, these nearly 40-year-old books work to demystify some of the idealized trappings retroactively projected onto enclosed shopping centers. More readily, they emphasize inchoate or latent existentialism characterizing mall-going at the height of its ‘80s popularity, as well as the gaping void that persists within so much of our consumerist lifestyle. Jacobs’s The Mall hints at many of the same issues as White Noise, now considered among DeLillo’s most popular and enduring works, albeit with much less eloquence and intentional humor, perhaps leaving some to ponder just how this curious retail ethnography got greenlighted, much less published.

Either way, the malls that Jacobs and DeLillo variously documented in the 1980s no longer wield the same cultural cachet they once did. As resonant reminders of time’s forward lurch and the impermanence of all things once ascendant, the ubiquity of dead shopping malls—analogous to “ghost” or “zombie” malls, which still operate but at much diminished capacity, scattered with mom and pop vape shops and nail salons—elicits visceral pangs of wistfulness even as Amazon buys them up to serve as massive fulfillment centers. 

Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.  He is a Libra who enjoys sunsets and long walks on the beach.

As seems to be par for the course for the Year of the Tiger, it’s an exciting time around the Triffid Ranch. Fiona Forney at the Richland Chronicle, my alma mater’s school newspaper, added an interview in the February issue … Continue reading →

Arguably one of the biggest success stories of the late OSR movement has been the publication of Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy (2019) and Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy (2021).  Indeed I feel that OSE has supplanted Swords & Wizardry, the darling of the middle OSR movement as the old-school game of choice.  It is the old-school game of choice here in my home game, alternating between it and D&D 5e, and seems to be the most talked-about game in the old-school discussion areas. 

This is all with good reason.  OSE is well designed, superbly organized, and has wonderful art.  There is a minimalist approach to the rules and presentation that does not detract from the experience, instead, it rather enhances it.   You can see my enthusiasm in my review of the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy Boxed set back in 2020.   So imagine my surprise when I learned I had not given OSE Advanced a proper review yet.

I have detailed my introduction to D&D many times here. But briefly, my "first" D&D was a poorly copied version of Holmes Basic with an AD&D Monster Manual.  My first "true" D&D, the one I could properly call my own was Moldvay Basic/Cook & MArsh Expert (commonly referred to as "B/X").  I would over the course of a year or so add in elements of AD&D.  Most importantly the Deities & Demigods, the Fiend Folio, and a copy of Eldritch Wizardry.  *My* D&D was always a mish-mash of Basic D&D and AD&D.  I later discovered that my playstyle was not at all unique.

Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Edition really strikes at the heart of what this sort of play was like.  The familiar and easy Basic/Expert rules with AD&D layered on top.  Layered is the right word, AD&D had a lot of situational rules and rules used in tournaments and rules designed to cover what looked like medieval realism.  As real that is in a world where half-elves fought dragons with magic.  OSE-AF strips this down back to the B/X style rules found in OSE-CF and then adds in what people used the most from AD&D.  No weapon speed factors, no tournament scoring, just D&D-style play.  

OSE-AF is divided into two books, the Player's Tome and the Referee's Tome.

For this review, I am considering the hardcover books I got via the Kickstarter, the PDFs from DriveThruRPG, and extra copies of the Player's Tome I picked up at my FLGS.  All books were purchased by me and none were submitted for review purposes.

OSE-AF Player's Tome

Hardcover. Black and White and color interior art and covers. 248 pages. Bookmarked PDF with hyperlinked table of contents and index. $40.00 for the hardcover print (retail). $15.00 for the PDF.

The Player's Tome covers everything an OSE-AF player needs to know. The book details a lot of the same rules that are found in the OSE-Classic Fantasy (or read: Basic) rules.  This new book though integrates the "Basic" and "Advanced" material together with some notes on the "Advanced Fantasy" sections. One might be tempted to say that this book is not needed if you have the OSE-CF book, but that is not really the case. While there are certainly more classes, and more monsters in the case of the Referee Tome, there is still quite a lot of new material here.  Enough to make AF twice as large content-wise as CF.   

The main feature of this book, and indeed all of the OSE line, is the layout.  All material is laid out so that everything you need to read is on facing pages.  So a character class always takes up two pages (even and odd) so that when laid flat everything can be read at once and easily.  There are very few exceptions to this rule and it gives OSE it's unique look and feel. Add in the art, sparingly but effectively used, the feel is elegant, if minimalist, efficiency.   This is the same design that made D&D 4e a joy to read.  The same feeling is here.

Advanced Fantasy follows its Advanced namesake and splits character race and character class into two separate things. Basic combined race and class so you got Clerics (always human) and Dwarves (always fighters).  Here is the option that most folks want in the "Advanced" game.  In addition to the four classes and the four races of Basic, this book introduces six more races and nine more classes.

In the OSE-AF book, we get: Acrobat, Assassin, Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Illusionist, Knight, Magic-user, Paladin, Ranger, and Thief.

There are also the "race as class" variants of: Drow, Duergar, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-elf, Halfling, Half-orc, Human, and Svirfneblin.  The level maximum is 14 for humans and variable for others. All race/class combinations are detailed.  This covers our first 80 some odd pages.

What follows next are guides for character advancement, equipment, animals of burden, transportation, and crews.

The next biggest section is Magic and this covers all the spells for the magic-using classes. Since the max level for any human is 14, spells are limited. Divine spellcasters are limited to the 5th level of casting and Arcane to the 6th level. The advantage here is the clerics and druids are on more equal footing with each other and so are magic-users and illusionists.  Unlike their Advanced namesake, this book does not require spell components nor are their other details given.  The spells are firmly in the Basic format.

The book wraps up with Adventuring, Hirelings, and building strongholds.  

The feel is solid B/X Basic with enough "Advanced" added in to make it feel just a little different. Or in other words, exactly how we used to play it from 1980 to 1983.

OSE-AF Referee's Tome

Hardcover. Black and White and color interior art and covers. 248 pages. Bookmarked PDF with hyperlinked table of contents and index. $40.00 for the hardcover print (retail). $15.00 for the PDF.

This book covers how to run an OSE-AF game.  Some of the details here are the same as OSE-CF but there are enough rules additions and clarification to make it worthwhile to anyone that has OSE-CF.

The first part covers running the game and adventures along with designing a dungeon and wilderness areas.

The next section, Monsters, makes up the bulk of the book.  All the old OSE-CF favorites are here and most of the Advanced era monsters.  In 107 or so pages we get over 320 monsters.  Again the art is light, but it is there.  We do not get any Demons or Devils, those are coming in a future book from my understanding, but it is still plenty.

The next largest section is Treasure which includes intelligent swords.

We also get sections on monster tables by terrain, strongholds, and NPCs.

The main feature of this book, and indeed all of the OSE line, is the layout.  All material is laid out so that everything you need to read is on facing pages. This is less obvious here as in the Player's Tome, but it is still a solid feature.

The two-volume set might just be the ultimate in expression of the time period in which I was doing my earliest D&D play.  There are other Basic/Advanced hybrid games out there and they all provide a good mix of their sources, but it is OSE-AF that is the closest to what I was playing then. All of the fun of Basic with the options in Advanced I loved.   The modularity of OSE also allows for expansion.  While the 1 to 14 level range covers most of what people will play there is no reason why there can't be an OSE-Companion to cover higher levels.

OSE-AF Carcass Crawler #1

PDF only, 32 pages. Color covers, black & white interior art. $7.50 PDF.

The sometimes zine for OSE and named for the OGC version of the infamous carrion crawler.

This issue adds the new races to the Advanced Fantasy line, the gargantuan (like Goliaths), the goblin, and the hephaestan (logical, elf-like beings).  I am particularly happy with the Goblin.

New classes for Classic and Advanced fantasy are the acolyte (a type of spell-less cleric with healing), the gargantuan (race-class), the goblin (race-class), the hephaestan (race-class), the kineticist (psychics), and the mage (a spell-less magic-user with magical abilities).

There are new rules for fighters and thieves as well as black powder guns.  I like the fighter talents, help give it a bit more to do really.  They are at every 5 levels, but I might make them every 4 instead. 

OSE-AF Fantasy Reference Booklet

PDF only, 32 pages. Color covers, black & white interior art. $4.00 PDF.

This handy guide covers all the major tables found in the OSE Advanced Fantasy line. For $4 it is a great little reference.

Through out all these books and the entire OSE line the art is both evocative of the old-school style and still modern enough to please new audiences.

This is the game of choice for me to introduce old-school style play to players of modern games. My regular 5e group took to it like ducks to water. They love it. They still love their 5e games, but they also like to do this one.  None of them had ever played B/X prior to this and it was a huge success.

I know that Gavin Norman and Necrotic Gnome have more material to give us for this, I hope it all lives up this new gold standard I set my OSR book to. 

It happens so often that it’s a Dallas punchline: make any plans on the first weekend of February, expect an ice storm to hit right when the event starts. And so it was with this Lunar New Year, with massive … Continue reading →

Back to Monstrous Mondays!  A quick update on where I am at with my Basic Bestiary.  Book 1 is done, I just have some editing and making sure my numbers are doing what I want them to do.  I am going back and increasing the Treasure amounts a little.  It has been pointed out to me that my Old-School games are rather light on the treasure.  I also want to make sure that my XP values are appropriate for the monsters' special abilities.  Book 2 needs a bit more work since I have a ton of undead, but I have a plan for that.  When I am done with all the "level setting" of Book 1, Book 2 will go much faster.

So what does that mean for you my good reader?  Well for the most part I am not going to post new monsters for a couple of weeks at least since I am not actively writing monsters.  That could change if I come across an entry that needs a top to down rewrite.

For a bit I am going to review some of the monster books I have here.  Not so much for the individual monsters, but for a feel of how they work together.  I am not looking for a unified milieu of monsters. On the contrary, the original Monster Manual was an odd collection of monsters of myth and legend and it is now my gold standard.  But at least how they can group together thematically.  Even if that theme is "fantasy roleplaying."

I am going to start with my newest one first.

Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse

Monsters of the Multiverse is the newest book in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition line.  It has been eagerly anticipated since the announcement of a rules update coming in 2024 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of D&D.  The new rules are likely to be something akin to D&D 5.5 or even D&D 5r.  I am not expecting a full-blown 6th edition yet. But that is for another time. Today my focus is on this new monster manual because that is indeed what it is.

Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse.  288 pages. Full-color cover and interior art. Part of the D&D 5 gift set, available separately in April.

Monsters of the Multiverse is split into two large chapters.  

Chapter 1: Fantastical Races

This chapter covers the various races that can be used as Player Characters. All in all there are 30 races (33 with subtypes) that are available to use as characters or NPCs here.  Many have appeared in other books and most date back to the 1st Ed days.  In particular, there are the expected choices like Deep Gnomes, Eladrin, Goblins, Minotaur, orcs, and so on.  There are a few I want to focus on.

Fairy. This is fun class and one that began in official D&D books in 4th edition. They are a fun little character that has worked well in other non-D&D FRPG for decades.  D&D in finally catching up.   I converted my own Dirty Nell from Ghosts of Albion and she worked out great. 

Goblins are getting some lore updates tying them deeper into the Feywild.  Again, D&D started this in 4e but are playing catch-up here.  Now you can play a Labyrinth style goblin or even one like you find in GURPS Goblins (a completely underrated and underappreciated GURPS supplement).  Of course, there are still many, many evil goblins and they are likely the majority.  But PCs are of any alignment.  My character for this race is Nik Nak, by Chaotic Neutral Goblin Warlock.

Minotaurs go back to 1st Ed Dragonlance as a PC race.  Well, now they are back.

Satyrs are now a playable race.  They were back in 4e where they are a male-only race with hamadryads as their female counterparts. In 5e this is expanded, satyrs can be male or female.  Now if you tell me satyrs are only male I am going to remind you there is a reason why you failed art history.  There are plenty of female satyrs depicted in art over the last few centuries.  I might be playing the stereotype here, but my satyr character is a bard named Roan.  For the hell of it he plays the bagpipes.

If you must have a male-only satyr race, then by all means do that. There is nothing in the rules that say you can't.  I am still a HUGE fan of the Hooves and Green Hair article by Bennet Marks in Dragon #109.  I even commented in my This Old Dragon for #109 that they would make great races for D&D 5.

Shadar-Kai the S&M goths of 4e are updated again for 5e. They premiered in 3e as a type of elf. They are back to being elves here (they had been re-introduced as a race in previous 5e books). My "evil Wonder Twins" of Runu and Urnu are my goto Shadar-kai. 

No race has a default alignment. Indeed alignments for races are never mentioned.  

Chapter 2: Bestiary 

This section covers 250 of the total 288 pages.  Here we get over 250 (259 by my count) monsters for 5e. This is the most of any book aside from the Monster Manual.  This makes this book more akin to the Fiend Folio or Monster Manual 2.  

There are some duplications here. If you have other books then it is very reasonable to ask do I really need this book?  I can't say how much each monster was updated.  A few had some edits and some were largely the same.  BUT I can let you know what monsters are here and where they came from first.

I have created a Google Sheets spreadsheet with all the monsters from all the D&D 5 books except the Monster Manual.  I'll add that one later, but I wanted to focus on all the "new" monsters first.  You can see the duplicates and what books have which monsters.

Despite the whinging of old men online, all the monsters in this book do in fact have alignments. Even ones that have playable race options.  There are still plenty of evil creatures to fight and kill. It is true that the alignments are prefaced by "typically" but that is just saying the quiet part out loud.  That was true for 1st ed and it has been true for every other edition too.  5e is not getting rid of alignment.  

If I had a complaint it is that major unique characters such as Fraz-Urb'luu, Graz'zt and Geyron are not listed under demons or devils, but rather alphabetically by name.  Oh they are still demons and devils and they are still evil to the core, they are just alphabetized by proper name instead of "Demon, Graz'zt." A nitpick to be sure. I kept them like that in my list.  Dinosaurs are listed under Dinosaur, however.  There is a listing for a "Brontosaurus" as opposed to the "Apatosaurus" but I kinda like that to be honest.  Also, my all-time favorite, the Dimetrodon, is here even though it is not a dinosaur. 

Who should buy this?

Well, that is a good question. Largely it depends on much you play D&D 5e and/or how much do you love monsters?   I love monsters. So this is a no brainer for me.  This is D&D 5e's Monster Manual II.

If you play D&D and do not have the other books listed in my sheet then yes get this. 

If you are looking for insight into what might be in D&D 5.5/5r well there is little new knowledge here.

If you play D&D and want to try out these new races, then yes, this is a great choice. 

For me?  I love it, I think it is fantastic and worth the money spent.

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

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

—oOo—
Name: The Haunted GrovePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: Cthulhu Dark Ages England
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-two page, 15.63 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: When your only refuge is a lonely house in the woods, sometimes it is better to stay lost. Plot Hook: Lost in the woods, and at least some of the family are welcoming...Plot Support: Detailed plot, staging advice for the Keeper, one floorplan, three (one) NPC(s) and their associated photographs, and two pre-generated Investigators.Production Values: Reasonable.
Pros# Mythos Folkloric horror scenario# Short, one-session scenario# Three strong archetypes for the Keeper to enjoy roleplaying# Suited to smaller groups of Investigators# Easy to adapt to elsewhere or for Cthulhu Invictus# Includes advice for adapting it to Cthulhu by Gaslight, Down Darker Trails, or modern day Call of Cthulhu# Potential addition to the scenario, ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’, from The Bride of Halloween Horror Monograph
Cons# Women (woman) as monster(s)# Includes mature, thematically appropriate scenes# Keeper needs to know her Mythos magic
Conclusion
# Isolated, Mythos Folkloric horror scenario# Includes mature, thematically appropriate scenes# Classic Mythos interpretation of a classic occult trinity

As a darkness falls over a Europe under the heel of the Nazi jackboot, a secret war has begun against the invader, one which at the direction of Winston Churchill, Prime Minster of Great Britain, would “…[S]et Europe ablaze.” This would be led by the Special Operations Executive or SOE, whose operatives, often working with local resistance forces, would carry out acts of sabotage against the Axis war effort, as well as work to establish secret armies which ultimately act in conjunction with Allied invading forces. However, there is a darker, more secret war, this against those Nazi agents and organisations which would command and entreat with the occult and forces beyond the understanding of mankind. Yet even this dark drive is riven by differing ideologies and approaches pandering to Hitler’s whims. The Black Sun consists of Nazi warrior-sorcerers supreme who use foul magic and summoned creatures from nameless dimensions to dominate the battlefields of men, whilst Nachtwölfe, the Night Wolves utilise technology, biological enhancements, and wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) to win the war for Germany. Ultimately, both utilise and fall under the malign influence of the Mythos… Standing against them, ready to thwart their malign efforts are the audacious Allied agents of Britain’s Section M, the United States’ Majestic, and the brave Resistance, willing to risk their lives and their sanity against malicious Nazi villains and the unfathomable gods and monsters of the Mythos themselves, each striving for supremacy in mankind’s darkest yet finest hour!

This is the set-up for Achtung! Cthulhu, the roleplaying game of fast-paced pulp action and Mythos magic published by Modiphius Entertainment. Originally published using Call of Cthulhu, Sixth Edition and Savage Worlds in 2013, and later FATE Core, almost a decade on, it returns in brand new edition. Not though written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, but rather for use with the publisher’s 2d20 System house mechanics, first seen in Mutant Chronicles and Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of. The result is a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative action in which the Player Characters can take the fight to the enemy, punch out the Nazis, and wield powerful sorcery or psychic powers against their agents and their Mythos allies, against the backdrop of World War II and the Nazi war machine.

The Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide—heralded as ‘Issue No. 1’ in a series on the cover—starts with a basic introduction to the roleplaying game and its setting, the latter underpinned by a handful of in-game rumours and eyewitness accounts that just hint at some of the horrors to come. It sets the scene before the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide dives into the details of the 2d20 System and Achtung! Cthulhu. Whenever a player wants his Agent to overcome a Test, he rolls two twenty-sided dice, aiming to roll under a target number. The target number is the value of an Attribute plus a Skill, with Difficulty of a task—ranging from zero to five, from researching the latest news in a newspaper morgue to maintaining your composure when confronted by dread Cthulhu on the once sunken island of R’lyeh—determines the number of successes necessary. Rolls under the target number generate successes. Rolls of one or if the Agent has a Focus in the skill, for example, Fighting (Threat Awareness) or Stealth (Rural Stealth), and rolls equal to or under the value of the skill, all count as Critical successes and are worth two successes rather than one. Any successes generated beyond those needed to beat a Difficulty generate Momentum, but any roll of twenty generates a Complication.

Momentum is a group resource shared by all of the players. It can be spent before a roll is made to purchase extra twenty-sided dice—up to three dice can be purchased this way, but the cost goes up the more dice are purchased; to create a Truth about a situation—Truth can make a situation less complicated or more complicated; obtain information by asking the Game Master; or to reduce the time it takes to perform a test. The players are encouraged to use Momentum, a point being lost at the end of each scene. If there is no Momentum, it can be gained by granting the Game master points of Threat, on a one-for-one basis. The Game master expends Threat to alter scenes, empower her NPCs, and add Complications. Threat can also be generated by a player buying off a Complication or even gaining access to exotic or deadly equipment or knowledge.

In addition all Agents possess Fortune Points. These can be spent to automatically gain a Critical Success, reroll the dice, take an additional major action in combat, to avoid defeat, or to make it happen and immediately add a new Truth to a situation. Fortune Points are regained at the start of each adventure, but can also be gained by voluntarily failing a Skill Test or invoking a scar and having an Agent’s past trauma or an injury inhibit his action.
For example, a team of agents is searching Colonel Köhler’s office for documents to photograph. Whilst another agent sneaks in, Eddie Chapman, posing as a German officer, will distract his secretary. The Game Master sets the Difficulty at two, as she is busy and wants to leave for lunch. Eddie combines his Insight Attribute of 11 with his Persuasion skill of 4. Eddie also has the Charm Focus. So Eddie’s player is rolling under a target number of 15 and any roll under the Charm skill’s value will generate Critical successes. Eddie’s player uses a point of Momentum to purchase a third twenty-sided die, so his player has three to roll rather than two. He rolls fourteen, five, and four. This generates a total of five successes—two each for the four and five as Critical successes, and one for the fourteen. Eddie succeeds in distracting the secretary and generates three Momentum. His player adds one to the Momentum pool, but spends two to add a Truth to the game, which is that the secretary is enamoured of Eddie and will accept his dinner invitation.The Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide goes into some detail for its combat mechanics. It uses the same core mechanics, but adds further uses for Momentum. This starts with the Keep Initiative option. In combat, the Game Master chooses who acts first, typically a Player Character. Then turn proceeds back and forth in turn between the Player Character Agents and the Game Master’s NPCs, but Momentum can be spent to enable an Agent to act straight after another Agent rather than an NPC. In a turn, a character can take a Minor Action—Aim, Draw Item, Movement, or Prepare, and a Major Action—Assist, Attack, Cast a Spell, Catch Breath, Create Truth, Pass, Ready, Rush, Stabilise, or make a Skill Test. Of these, Aim grants an extra twenty-sided die to an attack; Prepare readies a Major Action, typically Cast a Spell; Catch Breath can remove stress or a damage condition; Create Truth adds, alters, or removes a Truth in a situation; and Stabilise is an attempt to give medical attention to someone who is dying.
Skill Tests in combat are made using the appropriate Attribute and Skill, with Melee attacks being opposed rolls and Ranged attacks not. Damage rolls are made with Challenge Dice. Extra Challenge Dice can be added to an attack for high Attributes—a high Brawn for melee attacks and a high Insight for ranged attacks. Each Challenge Die is marked with a ‘1’, ‘2’, two faces left blank, and two marked with the ‘Achtung! Cthulhu’ symbol, which is equal to ‘1 plus effect’. The Effect results on the Challenge Dice come into play with weapon effects. These can be ‘Area’, ‘Piercing X’, ‘Stun’, ‘Vicious’, and so on. For example, a Bat has a ‘Stun’ Condition, firearms have the ‘Vicious’ Condition, and a Lifebuoy Portable Flamethrower, No. 2 Mk. II has the ‘Persistent’ Condition.

The numbers are added up and that indicates the amount of Stress inflicted on the opponent. Resistance will reduce the amount of Stress inflicted, from Armour and Cover for physical Stress, and Courage and Morale for mental Stress. Stress can be mental or physical, so physical might be from getting shot or punched, but mental might be from a spell or having a knife held to the throat! An Agent only has the one Stress track for handling both, and if an Agent suffers five Stress from a single attack or has his Stress track completely filled in, he suffers an Injury. Multiple types of Injury are listed, for example, Amputee or Lingering Shrapnel for a Physical Injury or Compulsive/Obsessive Rituals or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for a Mental Injury. An Injury serves as a Truth which will impede him under certain circumstances, whether mental or physical. If an Agent suffers three Injuries, he is defeated and if he suffers another, he is dead. An Injury, of either type can be healed, but that comes with the possibility of leaving a Scar, a permanent sign of the Injury. An Injury or a Scar can impede an Agent in play and earn him a Fortune Point if either of them causes the Agent to voluntarily fail.

An Agent in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 is defined by his Attributes, Skills, associated Skill Focuses, Talents, Truths, Belongings, and Contacts. He has six Attributes—Agility, Brawn, Coordination, Insight, Reason, and Will—rated between eight and twelve, with eight being average, whilst his Skills are rated between one and five. To create an Agent, a player chooses an Archetype, for example, Boffin, Con Artist, or Occultist; Nationality; a Background such as Air Force, Labourer, or Spiritual Leader; and a distinct Characteristic, like Bookworm, Owned an Occult Artefact, or Young at Heart. At each stage, an Agent receives bonuses to his Attributes and Skills, as well as Skill Focuses, Talents, Truths, Belongings, and Contacts. The exception is Nationality, which provides a Nationality and Languages as Truths. The process consists of a player making choices at each stage, and the range of Archetype, Nationality, Background, and Characteristic options enable him to create a wide range of character types.

Eddie Chapman
Nationality: British
Archetype: Con Artist
Background: Criminal
Characteristic: Criminal Mindset

ATTRIBUTES
Agility 09 Brawn 07 Coordination 07 Insight 11 Reason 08 Will 09

STRESS TRACK – 10

RESISTANCE
Armour Resistance: 0
Courage Resistance: 1

BONUS DICE
Melee Attacks: 0
Ranged Attacks: +2
Magical/Mental Attacks: +1

SKILLS
Academia 1, Engineering 1, Observation 3 (Instincts), Persuasion 4 (Charm), Resilience 1 (Discipline), Stealth 4 (Urban Stealth), Tactics 1, Vehicles 1

TALENTS
A Way With Words, Subtle Cues, Perfect Timing

TRUTHS
English, Black Market Dealer, Criminal Mindset

LANGUAGES
English, German

BELONGINGS
Disguise Kit

Unlike other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Player Characters—or Agents—can begin play knowing magic. This requires the Occultist Archetype and a Talent with the spellcaster keyword. Magic is either learnt through a Tradition—Runeweaving (draws on the power of Runes to channel the power of the Viking gods), Druidism (animistic and natural beliefs), or Psychic; Dabbling—typically by amateurs who initially learn flawed spells; or Research—through rigorous study. Spells include battlefield magic like Spear of Lug or Curse of Loki, and rituals such as Commune with Deity or Baldur’s Shield, which requires time and the caster to inflict Stress against the ritual’s Stress Track to successfully cast it. Psychic abilities include Combat Perception and Telepathy. A spellcaster has the base Power rating of one, indicating the number of Challenge Dice his player rolls to inflict Stress—both on the target or ritual, or the spellcaster himself as a consequence of casting the spell. Spell types include attack, banishment, blessing, control, curse, discharged, divination, manifestation, and summoning.

Spells can be miscast, indicated by a roll of a Complication on any die, the Complication widening the greater the Difficulty of casting the spell, and they can also be flawed, which means that the spell automatically generates a Complication, extra twenty-sided dice can only be bought using Threat, and there are no Momentum expenditures associated with that version of the spell. Spellcasters can also engage in magical duels. Overall, there are only a handful of spells for each Tradition, and only two Rituals. There are no Mythos spells, although Agents can learn them.

Henry Brinded
Nationality: American
Archetype: Occultist
Background: Academic
Characteristic: Veteran of the Great War

ATTRIBUTES
Agility 06 Brawn 08 Coordination 09 Insight 08 Reason 10 Will 10

STRESS TRACK – 12

RESISTANCE
Armour Resistance: 0
Courage Resistance: 2

BONUS DICE
Melee Attacks: 0
Ranged Attacks: 0
Magical/Mental Attacks: +2

BASE POWER: 2

SPELLS
Wisdom of Frigg, Balm of Belenus

SKILLS
Academia 4 (Linguistics, Occultism), Fighting 1, Observation 2, Persuasion 3 (Invocation), Resilience 2 (Discipline), Stealth 1, Survival 2


TALENTS
Occult Scholar, Library Dweller, Sharpshooter

TRUTHS
English, Professor of Classics

LANGUAGES
English, Latin

Beyond the rules, character creation, and magic, most of the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide is devoted to the arms, armour, equipment and forces of the Allied and Axis powers. This includes guns, tanks, and more, primarily for the American, British, and German forces. There are rules here too for vehicular combat. The coverage of the armed forces is broad, focusing mainly on the special forces and intelligence agencies, and on actual historical agencies rather than the ones operating in the world of Achtung! Cthulhu. Stats are given for various Allied troop types and there is a discussion of the Home Front too.

So the question is, what is missing from the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide? Primarily the Mythos. This is understandable, given that actual knowledge should be for the Game Master to know and the players and their Agents to find out. However, what this also means is that there are no Mythos spells despite some Occultist Agents being allowed to learn them, and perhaps worse, no rules for handling Sanity when encountering the Mythos as per other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Well, okay, perhaps the players and their Agents do not need to know how Sanity is lost—yet, but it is not difficult to surmise as a being a Skill Test using Will and Resilience against a Difficulty which will vary according to the unnatural nature of the Mythos entity encountered or spell cast, with failures leading to Challenge Dice rolls which inflict Stress and mental Injuries. Oddly, whilst there are stats for Allied forces, there are none for the enemy, despite there being stats for German vehicles and tanks.

Physically, the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide is well presented. It does need an edit in places, but it is well written, and there are some excellent examples of play which explain how the roleplaying game is intended to be played. However, the book’s full colour artwork is fantastic. Much of it has been seen in the previous iteration of Achtung! Cthulhu, but the new artwork in the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide is really good, capturing the action, excitement, and horror of the war against the darkest forces of the Axis powers.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 is not a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror for the player who prefers the Purist style of play. It is too action orientated with guns aplenty and Agents who can cast magic, and thus too Pulpy in tone and style. In fact, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 is not a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror at all. Rather Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 is instead a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian action horror in which the Player Characters fight evil as well as confront the unknowable—and the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Player’s Guide is a great start to the action and the horror.

Given the origins of the roleplaying hobby—in wargaming and in the drawing of dungeons that the first player characters, and a great many since, explored and plundered—it should be no surprise just how important maps are to the hobby. They serve as a means to show a tactical situation when using miniatures or tokens and to track the progress of the player characters through the dungeon—by both the players and the Dungeon Master. And since the publication of Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the hobby has found different ways in which to provide us with maps. Games Workshop published several Dungeon Floor Sets in the 1980s, culminating in Dungeon Planner Set 1: Caverns of the Dead and Dungeon Planner Set 2: Nightmare in Blackmarsh; Dwarven Forge has supplied dungeon enthusiasts with highly detailed, three-dimensional modular terrain since 1996; and any number of publishers have sold maps as PDFs via Drivethrurpg.com. Loke Battle Mats does something a little different with its maps. It publishes them as books.

A Loke BattleMats book comes as a spiral-bound book. Every page is a map and every page actually light card with a plastic covering. The fact that it is spiral-bound means that the book lies completely flat and because there is a map on every page, every map can be used on its own or combined with the map on the opposite page to work as one big, double-page spread map. The fact that the book is spiral bound means that it can be folded back on itself and thus just one map used with ease or the book unfolded to reveal the other half of the map as necessary. The fact that every page has a plastic covering means that every page can be drawn on using a write-on/wipe-off pen. It is a brilliantly simple concept which has already garnered the publisher the UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards for Best Accessory for the Big Book of Battlemats and both the UK Games Expo 2019 Best Accessory and UK Games Expo 2019 People’s Choice Awards Best Accessory for Giant Book of Battle Mats.
The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats is a ‘Set of 2 Battle Map Books for RPG’. As a set, it comes as two volume set of map books in a slipcase—open ended at either side for easy access. Each of the two volumes is a twelve-inch squire square, spiral bound book, with each containing sixty maps, all marked with a square grid. These start with a pair of blank maps, but quickly leap into depicting particular locations. There are ruined courtyards verging on rough cave areas or overgrown grassed areas, before delving underground. Stairways leading down, a large room with a circular pool or fountain, eating or meeting areas around an open fire, a complex of rooms either partially flooded with either water or a gas or a magical field, a gaol area, a series of rough caves, a library and wizard’s work area, a puzzle trap over a roiling flame pit, a series of rooms accessed by a set of gear traps, sewer areas, and lastly, a demonic villain’s lair… And this is the same in each of the two books. This does not mean that the maps are exactly the same in each book. Rather they are thematically similar and this leads into what is perhaps the greatest feature of The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats.
Each two-page spread of the two volumes of The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats consists of two linked maps—physically and thematically. The Game Master can use either of the maps on the two-page spread on their own or together, as a twelve by twenty-four-inch rectangular map. That though is with the one volume. With two volumes together, the Game Master can combine any single map from one volume with any single map from the other, and if that is not flexible enough, any two-page spread from one volume can be placed next to a two-page spread from the other, in the process, creating a twenty-four by twenty-four-inch square map. This gives The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats a fantastic versatility which the Game Master can take advantage of again and again in choosing a combination of map pages from the two volumes to create location after location, and then use them to build encounter after encounter.
The individual maps are excellent, being bright, vibrant, detailed, and clear. They are easy to use and easy to modify. A Game Master can easily adjust them with a write-on/wipe-off pen to add features of her own. This is especially important if the Game Master wants to use a map which has previously featured in one of her adventures. She can also add stickers if she wants new features or even actual physical terrain features.
However, there is a limitation on how and when the two volumes in The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats can or should be used. To begin with, they are not necessarily that easy to use on the fly, to ready up an encounter at a moment’s notice. Instead, they are easier to use as part of the Game Master’s preparation and then have everything necessary to play. Then obviously, the maps cannot be used over and over lest familiarity become an issue. Lastly, there are the maps themselves, which are constrained by the square and rectangular formats, whether combining the two volumes or not. It means that the layouts are often too regular, too compact, and lacking in that sense of black, empty space in between locations within a dungeon. Now this is not obviously an issue in other collections such as The Towns & Taverns of Battle Mats or The Towns & Taverns of Battle Mats, where there is an expected sense of regularity and compact size, or a more open sense of space. Neither of these are issues which will prevent a Game Master from using The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats, but rather that she should be aware of them prior to bringing them to the table.
Physically, The Dungeon Books of Battle Mat is very nicely produced. The maps are clear, easy to use, fully painted, and vibrant with colour. One issue may well be with binding and the user might want to be a little careful folding the pages back and forth lest the pages crease or break around the spiral comb of the binding. Although there is some writing involved in The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats, it is not really what a Game Master is looking for with this two-volume set. Nevertheless, that writing very much needs the attention of an editor.
There is no denying the usefulness of maps when it comes to the tabletop gaming hobby. They help players and Game Masters alike visualise an area, they help track movement and position, and so on. If a gaming group does not regularly use miniatures in their Science Fiction games, The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats might not be useful, but it will still help them visualise an area, and it may even encourage them to use them. If they already use miniatures, whether fantasy roleplaying or wargaming, then the maps in The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats will be undeniably useful. And there are so many fantasy roleplaying games which The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats will work with, almost too many to list here…
The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats is full of attractive, ready-to-use maps that the Game Master can bring to the table for the fantasy roleplaying game of her choice. Both practical and pretty, The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats is an undeniably useful accessory for fantasy gaming in general.