Last week I reviewed the penultimate monster tome ever created, the AD&D Monster Manual. this week I look at the second-ever produced AD&D monster book, and maybe one of the most loved OR most hated books, depending on who you ask; I mean of course 1981's Fiend Folio.

I will admit upfront, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.  There was something so different, so strange and so British about it.  I loved listening to Pink Floyd, The Who, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin while watching Monte Python, the Young Ones, Doctor Who and more I was a died in the wool Anglophile.  In the 80s if it was British it was good was my thinking.  The Fiend Folio was all that to me.

Yes. I am 100% in the "I Loved It!" camp.

Now, that doesn't mean I was immune to the problems it had.  But I'll get into that in detail in a bit.

Fiend Folio Tome

First available as a hardcover in 1981.  Available as PDF ($9.99) and PoD ($11.99 or $13.99 combined) via DriveThruRPG.  128 pages, color covers, black & white interior art.
The Fiend Folio is something of the lost forgotten middle child of AD&D.  Don Turnbull, then editor of White Dwarf magazine had been collecting monsters for his magazine since 1976.   In 1979 He wanted to publish a book of these monsters through Games Workshop as a new monster tome companion to the then released Monster Manual.  Through various legal wranglings which included TSR wanting to buy GW and then starting TSR UK, the book came to be published by TSR in 1981.

The hardcover was the fifth hardcover overall, the second "in a series of AD&D roleplaying aids", the last to use the classic cover art style and dress, and the only AD&D hardcover never updated to a new Jeff Easley cover.    To cement the perception that this book was the "middle child" every book after it had the new Jeff Easley covers and about as many were published before it as after it.

When released the book caused a bit of a stir.  In Dragon Magazine #55 we had no less of a personage than Ed Greenwood blasting the book with his Flat Taste Didn't Go Away.  Ouch. That is a bit harsh Ed and the article doesn't get much lighter. I am sure there were plenty of old-school AD&D fans who were at the time saying "Who the hell is this Ed Greenwood guy and why do I care about his opinion?"  Sy though, Ed is no fan of this book and calls many of the monsters incomplete, inadequate and many are redundant.  AND to be 100% fair he is making some very good points here. The editing is all over the place, many of the monsters are useless or way overpowered in some respects.
Alan Zumwalt follows this with Observations of a Semi-Satisfied Customer.  An endorsement, but not the ringing endorsement one might want.
Not to be forgotten Don Turnbull,  Managing Director of TSR UK, Ltd. and Editor of the FIEND FOLIO Tome ends with his Apologies - and Arguments; his defense of the Fiend Folio.
All three articles make good points and overreach in others. In the end, I still love the Fiend Folio, not despite its weirdness, but because of it.  I have decided though that when I run a pure Forgotten Realms game that I will not include any of the monsters that Ed found objectionable.  I was going to say not include any from this book, but that includes Drow and we know that isn't going to happen!

There are some "translation" errors here too.  In particular when the monster was written for OD&D and then later updated to AD&D.  Others the art didn't seem to fit the description.  I still find it hard to see how the T-Rex looking Babbler is supposed to be a mutation of the Lizard Man.


That is all great and a wonderful bit of historical context, but none of that had any effect on the way I played and how I used the book.

Everyone will talk about how that is the book that gave us the Adherer, the Flumph, Flail Snail, Lava Children,  and my least favorite, the CIFAL.    But it is also the book that gave us the Death Knight, Skeleton Warriors, Revenant, the Slaadi, Son of Kyuss and more.

The D&D cartoon featured the Shadow Demon and Hooked Horrors.  The D&D toy line used the Bullywugs.  And creatures like the Aarakocra, Kenku, Githyanki and Githzerai would go on to greater fame and use in future editions of D&D.  Some even first appeared in other D&D modules that got their first-ever hardcover representations here; like the Daemons, Kuo-Toa, and the Drow.

Many monsters came from the pages of White Dwarf's Fiend Factory.  Even these monsters were a mixed bag, but there were so many.  So many in fact that there could have been a Fiend Folio II.

Flipping through this book I am struck with one thing.  For a tome called the "Fiend Folio" there are not really a lot of fiends in it.  Lolth, the Styx Devil, Mezzodaemon, Nycadaemon and maybe the Guardian Daemon.

While this book does not fill me with the deep nostalgia of the discover of D&D like the Monster Manual does, it fills me with another type of nostalgia.  The nostalgia of long night playing and coming up with new and exciting adventures and using monsters that my players have never seen before.



For the record, here are some of my favorites:  Apparition, Berbalang, Booka, Coffer Corpse, Crypt Thing, Dark Creeper, Dark Stalker (Labyrinth anyone?), Death Dog, Death Knight, Lolth, the new Dragons, the Elemental Princes of Evil, Drow, Errercap, Eye of Fear and Flame, Firedrake, Forlarren, Githyanki, Githzerai, Gorilla Bear (yes! I loved these guys), Grell, Grimlocks, Guardian Familiar, Hellcat, Hook Horrors (though I felt I had to use them), Hounds of Ill Omen, Huecuva, Kelpie, Kuo-toa, Lamia Noble, Lizard King (Jim Morrison jokes for D&D at last!), Meazel, Mephit, Mezzodaemon, Necrophidius, Neeleman (well...I didn't like the monster, I liked the SNL skit he reminded me of), Nilbogs (ok, no I didn't like these guys unless I was running the adventure), Norker, Nycadaemon, Ogrillon, Penanggalan (yes! loved these, but they should have been closer to the vampire as described in the MM), Poltergiest, Revenant, Scarecrow, Shadow Demon, Skeleton Warrior, Slaad, Son of Kyuss, Sussurus, Svirfneblin, the new trolls, Yellow Musk Creeper and Yellow Mush Zombie (Clark Ashton Smith for the win!).

The remainder of the book is given over to expanded tables.

The Future of the Folio

When I have talked about the Fiend Folio in the past most of the time I get a lot of positive remarks, so maybe the ages have been kind to the odd little middle child of D&D.

Since it's publication the Fiend Folio has seen a little more love.
The 14th (!) Monstrous Compendium Appendix for AD&D 2nd Edition was based on the Fiend Folio, though it would be almost 10 years after the hardcover version.   MC14 Monstrous Compendium Fiend Folio Appendix is available in PDF.

The 3rd Edition years gave us TWO different versions of the Fiend Folio.  The 3e Fiend Folio from WotC features many of the original Fiend Folio monsters, but also a lot more fiends; so living up to it's name a bit more.  Not to be outdone, Necromancer Games gave us the first of the Tome of Horrors books which feature many more of the original Fiend Folio monsters for OGL/d20.



Back in Print

So imagine my delight when I saw that the Fiend Folio on DriveThruRPG was now offering a Print on Demand option.  So, of course, I had to get it.  It was soft cover only, but I thought it would work nicely next to my Games Workshop printing softcover Monster Manual.
I was not wrong.



Other than one is a hardcover and the other is a softcover it is very difficult to tell the two prints apart.  Even the interiors compare well.

So maybe time has been kinder to the Fiend Folio. I still enjoy using it.

Pepe Tesoro / November 19, 2019

Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is usually regarded as one of the best testimonies of Cold War paranoia and early psychedelic ’60s culture. Even though it is a keen and pointed exploration of the growing anxieties over the exponential post-war rise of mass media and market capitalism, the central conspiracy revealed in the novel doesn’t reproduce itself through the then-new and fascinating forces of radio waves or cathode rays. Quite the opposite: the kernel of the conspiracy in Pynchon’s novel lays precisely in a clandestine communication network sent through old-fashioned, conventional mail. This network itself possesses roots that go back as far as medieval nobility feuds, its presence identified with something as ancient and basic as graffiti. Fredric Jameson attributed the true effectiveness of the novel to this anomalous feature. “[T]he force of Pynchon’s narrative,” he writes in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, “draws not on the advanced or futuristic technology of the contemporary media so much as from their endowment with an archaic past.”

It would seem that in order to perform an adequate exploration of the psychological and social and political disruptions of an era’s newest and most cutting-edge technological developments, sometimes it is required to take one or two steps back, as if the reflection over contemporary objects would be better served through the examination of old and already familiar realities. The long history and deep cultural footprint of retro-futuristic aesthetics in Pynchon’s fictional universe seems to point in somewhat the same direction. But this odd narrative movement doesn’t just go backwards; it also, quite interestingly, usually goes downwards. That’s the case of the The Crying of the Lot 49, where the occult conspiracy that our poor protagonist, Oedipa Maas, struggles to unveil, doesn’t just rely on the old means of the mail. Its members are imagined as marginalized individuals living in between the remnants and scraps of industrial machinery, as if the life of the vagabond would be the only true escape from the madness of modern civilization. These elusive individuals, as imagined by Oedipa, seem to be:

…squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.

This supposed conspiracy of the homeless and the outcast, not subtly named W.A.S.T.E., is then imagined as a hidden net that mimics modern global communication networks, and even lives as close as it can to those hardware channels. And precisely because of that, it stays totally untouched by modernity and is invisible to its gaze. The particular mixture of secrecy, homelessness, and clandestine communication systems in Oedipa’s imagination was not new at the time, and can be traced back to the life and especially the works of one Leon Ray Livingston. 

Livingston, born in 1872, was probably the most notorious American hobo. “Hobo“ is actually a rather particular term in American cultural history; it doesn’t merely designate an individual who lacks a stable location or place for living, but it instead indicates a quite idiosyncratic American social character, determined by the country’s own history of geographical expansion and industrialization. The hobo was a homeless man that crossed the entire continent, from city to city, throughout the growing railroad’s network, surfing the new, blossoming industrial landscapes a job at a time. Throughout the years, the hobo came to be recreated by the national cultural imagination as a romantic figure, a mystical outsider, a mysterious and almost invisible inhabitant of the modern world’s new industrial features, constantly at the edge of society, always trying to avoid unwelcome company and harassing authorities. That popular image was mostly the work of Livingston.

Livingston was not just a hobo; he was also a popular author. Under the pen name of “A-No1,” he published a series of books that fictionalized the hobo lifestyle and basically created from scratch the romantic and enigmatic portrait just described. But probably the most fascinating and persistent myth that emerged from the A-No1 books was the existence of a secret hobo code, presented in unnoticed and almost invisible chalk or charcoal graffiti. This code, composed of cryptic, seemingly ordinary and almost-childish hieroglyphs and symbols, was supposedly used by traveling hobos to transmit messages to their colleagues, such as “Dangerous town,” “Safe place to spend the night,” or “Here lives a nice lady.” It is known and well-documented (mostly through the work of filmmaker Bill Daniel) that the practice of signing the side of wagons and rail post with their personal monikers was and still is a spread practice for hobos and railroad workers in America. But with respect to a secret code that transmitted useful messages from hobo to hobo, there is not much evidence that it actually existed. After all, why would the hobo, a supposedly elusive and off-the-grid character, want to make public their own secret means of communication? It is not unfair to assume that the publication of the hobo code was probably nothing more than a ploy to fabricate and maintain that same legendary elusiveness.

Either way, thanks to Leon Ray Livingston’s works, the hobo’s supposed secret code became a common emblem of the intriguing and puzzling (and pretty much fantastic) mysteries of industrial civilization’s own underground realities. It seemed at the same time spooky and exhilarating to imagine that the unstoppable machine of progress was leaving behind, in its own dark residue, a striving secret society of outcasts and ostracized rebels living an almost chivalrous adventure, having happily exchanged social status and at times mental health to be free of the oppressive commands of power. I think it goes without saying how popular this common narrative has stayed throughout the years in science fiction and, more generally, in popular culture. The mystic figure of the marginalized can be tracked from the charming and magical homeless lady in Frank Capra’s A Pocketful of Miracles, to the cyberpunk Martian mutant separatists in Total Recall, to the Lo-Teks in Johnny Mnemonic and the Nebuchadnezzar crew in The Matrix series, just to name a few. These cyberpunk re-imaginations fall under the myth of the “hidden utopia”: the assumption that the hopes of resistance against the conspiracy of modern civilization lays in a counter-conspiracy of the outcasts, the unlikely sub-inhabitants of its most obscure and remote corners.

Leon Ray Livingston’s “signs used by Tramps” in his 1911 book Hobo-Camp-Fire-Tales, written under the A-No1 pseudonym.

This is exactly what is deployed by Pynchon in The Crying of the Lot 49. Or, at least, this is how a borderline-paranoid protagonist tends to imagine a seemingly active but always evasive conspiracy, as if the myth of the hidden utopia could be also a borderline-paranoid fantasy of those made anxious and disoriented by postmodern subjectivity. It’s also possible to observe the echo of the hobo graffiti’s legend in Pynchon’s book, as the W.A.S.T.E. logo, a simply drawn muted cornet, suspiciously similar to the purported signs of the hobo code, appears to have been placed all over the most seemingly mundane corners of Oedipa’s reality, such as on the walls of a public bathroom or on the edge of a sidewalk.

But the recovery and use by Pynchon of these older cultural cues is not an idealization of the hidden problems of the homeless and the marginalized. After all, any social articulation outside the limits of the community itself can easily turn into a contradiction, a fantasy, a paradox not allowed by the predominant culture. If the whole world has been conquered by malignant forces and crooked interests, the possibility of a constructive, non-nihilistic escape from this system literally lays outside of this world. That’s why Pynchon, as Oedipa, finds himself at a dead end, accepting that, if W.A.S.T.E. and its obscure conspirators were to exist, its own definition would prohibit the final revelation of its actual existence. That’s good for Pynchon, who playfully explores the literary potential of such contradiction, but it ain’t so good for Oedipa, who is still and forever trapped in modern society, and seems destined to always live on the epistemic edge of paranoia, unable to determine if everything she experiences is a convoluted prank by her ex-lover, if she has gone definitively crazy, or if W.A.S.T.E. is, in fact, real.

In a dream-like episode in the middle of the novella, Oedipa encounters an old ex-anarchist friend, Jesús Arrabal, who, torn apart by the demise of the emancipatory narrative, has to admit to her the metaphysical impossibility, or at least almost supernatural essence, of any revolutionary promise: “You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one.” Alien invasion? Religious intervention? Not quite, but similarly unlikely: the possibility that, under the all-mighty and ubiquitous forces of the Machinery and the cannibalistic and expanding logic of Capital, there could have formed a secret alliance of those who have been cast out of society, those who inhabit the obscure nooks of the dirt and the piles of garbage, under the colossal figure of the ominous constructions and highways. Like parasites in the wires of modern communication systems, these posited liberatory beings have been exiled in a land “invisible yet congruent with the cheered land [Oedipa] lived in,” barely but firmly surviving out of the realm of the living, right next to where we stand, but nevertheless unnoticed by the naked eye.

Pepe Tesoro is a philosophy PhD student from Madrid. You can follow him at @pepetesoro.

As its title suggests Bayt al Azif – A magazine for Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying games is a magazine dedicated to roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Published by Bayt al Azif it includes content for both Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition from Chaosium, Inc. and Trail of Cthulhu from Pelgrane Press, which means that its content can also be used with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and The Fall of DELTA GREEN. Published in October, 2018, Bayt al Azif Issue 01 includes four scenarios, reviews of classic titles for Call of Cthulhu, new rules, interviews, an overview of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying in 2017, and more. All of which comes packaged in a solid, full colour, Print On Demand book.

Bayt al Azif Issue 01 opens with an editorial, ‘Houses of the Unholy’, which manages to explore both the meaning and origins of the magazine’s title and perhaps suggest a possible scenario seed drawn’ like said title, from the life of eighteenth century novelist and antiquarian, William Thomas Beckford, and the infamous gothic folly, Fonthill Abbey. This would some development upon the part of the Keeper, but the editorial certainly provides some pointers. It is followed by ‘Sacrifices’, the magazine’s letters page, the missives here posted in response to the preview of the first issue, and ‘How to play’, by the editor, Jared Smith. This is serviceable enough, starting with the fiction and a discussion of the themes found in Call of Cthulhu, but it has dated given that it does not take into account the number of scenarios available from various publishers to help prospective players and Keepers started.

Dean Englehardt of CthulhuReborn.com—publisher of Convicts & Cthulhu: Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying in the Penal Colonies of 18th Century Australia—presents ‘CthuReview 2017’, a look back from 2018 of the previous year in terms of Lovecraftian investigative horror and its associated segment of the gaming hobby. It covers the notable figures and their doings as well as the various publishers, projects, Kickstarters, and more. It is a rather useful overview which nicely chronicles the year keeps us abreast of anything that we may have missed or forgotten. It is notable for including several Kickstarter projects which have to be fulfilled.

In terms of gaming content, the first scenario in Bayt al Azif Issue 01 is ‘A Conspiracy in Damascus’, again by Jared Smith. It casts the investigators as members of the Diwan al-Barid, the courier service of the Muslim caliphate in the eighth century, tasked with discovering the nature of a large object a group of Bedouin from an unknown tribe transported to the city and then transfered to a local merchant who bribed a guard to let it pass through uninspected. This is a swords and sand investigation, with opportunities for roleplay and combat and a nice feel for the history of the city which goes all the way back to Roman era. This period of history, post-Cthulhu Invictus, but pre-Cthulhu Dark Ages is is sadly unexplored in terms of Lovecraftian investigative horror, so this scenario is to be welcomed. That said, advice is given on how to adapt it to other periods, including Cthulhu by Gaslight and the relatively recent here and now.

The second scenario is also by Jared Smith, as is the third. ‘Double Dare’ is a modern-set, single-night one-shot scenario, initially written for play on Halloween. It casts the investigators as teenagers, bullied into spending a night in a reputedly haunted schoolhouse on Halloween. This is a thoroughly creepy piece with a constricting mechanic driving the narrative, necessary for a one-shot. Not a scenario for anyone who suffers from automatonophobia. This also benefits from a good handful of handouts. The third scenario. ‘Overdue’, is a short, fifty-entry solo adventure set in the library at Miskatonic University where the player character is a custodian, cleaning and tidying up after the students and academic staff each day. Of course, nasty thing are afoot as the library lives up to its terrifying reputation. This is a short, brutal scenario, stripped down in its mechanics to really just sanity, but easy to replay if the investigator dies.

The fourth scenario, ‘Easier to Fill the Ocean with Stones’ is written by Rich McKee rather than Jared Smith. This is set in Vietnam in 1968 and sends the investigators into a war zone where American forces may have committed an atrocity. Tasked with determining what happened, the investigators must chase after the potential perpetrators as North Vietnamese and other forces descend on the region. This is a murky, messy scenario and suitably so. It can be run on its own or adapted to run with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game or The Fall of DELTA GREEN, made easier by having GUMSHOE System mechanics.

Stu Horvath offers two reviews under the ‘Vintage RPG’ title, one of Arkham Unveiled, the other of Escape from Innsmouth. Each is only a single page, and unfortunately, with both pages in each case consisting of more pictures than text, there is little depth to either. Disappointing in both cases when really two pages could have been devoted to either and even then neither would have been  explored in sufficient depth or thought. Fortunately, Jason Smith’s ‘Sites of Antiquity’ more than makes up for it, exploring the much re-purposed archaeological site of Husn Suleiman, as well as suggesting some Mythos connections. The inclusion of actual photographs of the site and a map adds to the verisimilitude. Equally, Catherine Ramen’s ‘Rebooting Campaigns with a Modern Sensibility’ is just as good, if in a different way. It highlights some of the prejudices and discrimination present in the classic period of the 1920s (and elsewhen) and thus, if unintentionally, in Call of Cthulhu and its supplements, and then addresses how to adjust what has always been a historical game by increasing diversity and representation. A welcome companion piece to Darker Hue Studios’ Harlem Unbound: A Sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu and Gumshoe Roleplaying Games.

The full title of ‘Clerical Cosmic Horror: The Brief Era of the Cthulhu Mythos as Dungeons & Dragons Pantheon’ gives away the subject of Zach Howard’s article. It is a good history of the Cthulhu mythos in the hobby prior to the publication of Call of Cthulhu in 1981, and again, a good companion piece to the more recent The Making and Breaking of Deities & Demigods by James M. Ward.

There are two interviews in Bayt al Azif Issue 01. The first and longer one is ‘Going Rogue – An interview with Rogue Cthulhu’. This is a team of Keepers and scenario authors who run their creation at conventions such as GenCon and elsewhere. Based and operating solely in the USA, this is a good look at the fan side of the hobby and Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. It gives the team their due and highlights how the fans bring Call of Cthulhu to life. Sadly, the interview with Chris Spivey of Darker Hue Studios in ‘Harlem Renaissance’ is half the length of the other interview and as informative as it is, the length of the first interview does leave the reader wanting more. 

Jensine Eckwall’s ‘Character Creation’ is the first of two cartoons in Bayt al Azif Issue 01. It is short and sweet, but the horror is decently done. The likewise short ‘Grave Spirits’ takes the central character of a doctor into Red Hook, but lacks the punch of ‘Character Creation’. Hopefully future installments will develop from the set-up presented here. Lastly, ‘Run for it! – Random Tables for Chases’ provides obstacles, hazards, and barriers for chases on foot. This is very useful article, handily supplementing the chase mechanics in Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition.

Physically, Bayt al Azif Issue 01 lacks polish, having the somewhat rougher feel of a fanzine. In another publication, this might be seen as charming, but here it is more something for the publisher and authors to strive to overcome. It could also benefit from a better choice and use of artwork, some of it feeling as if it is there because the designers could rather than because it is suitable. In general, the layout of Bayt al Azif Issue 01 feels inconsistent and could do with a stronger layout style.

Ultimately, the originality, and in some cases, the unique nature of the scenarios make the first issue of Bayt al Azif worth the price of admission and all come with pre-generated investigators ready to download, whilst many of the extras are informative or useful, if not both. If this first issue lacks polish, then that means that future issues can only look and feel better, for Bayt al Azif Issue 01 is a solid first issue. And that bodes well for Bayt al Azif Issue 02. 

If you have The Black Hack and Whitehack, then surely you must have the ‘Grey Hack’. Well no, what you have instead is Macchiato Monsters: Rules for Adventures In a Dungeonverse You Build Together, an Old School Renaissance roleplaying game which draws from both to provide simple mechanics, freedom of character design, streamlined combat, and freeform magic, plus an emphasis upon risk and the use of resources. Now that latter aspect sounds like the play of Macchiato Monsters involves some kind of crunchy of resource management, but nothing could be further from the truth, for Macchiato Monsters uses dice—indicated as Δ4, Δ6, Δ8, and so on—throughout to handle each player character’s resources and more… Macchiato Monsters is published by Lost Pages and is available here.

Character creation in Macchiato Monsters is straightforward enough. A player rolls three six-sided dice for the six traditional statistics—Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. A player is then free to swap any two of these. Then he invents a Trait. This can be a race, an occupation, a background, a faction, and so on. Hit Points are rolled on a six-sided die, this die type also representing a character’s Hit Dice and as his martial prowess, this is also his ability to wield better or more efficient arms and armour. A character is given two options which can be to add the roll of a six-sided die to a stat under ten; gain another trait or another Hit Die; take martial training and increase his Hit Dice; and undertake Specialist Training and create an ability which can be used once per day or undertake Magic Training and create two spells which can be used once per day.

Next—and instead of choosing equipment—a player rolls for it. There are nine tables to roll on, each with twenty entries, covering equipment and food, wealth and valuables, mêlée weapons, missile weapons, armour, magical trinkets, heirlooms and heritage, and faith. The player assigns one die type to each table—four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided, and so on—and rolls on the table. This represents the equipment that a beginning character has been able to muster before stepping out on his adventuring career. 

Our sample character is a re-interpretation of the treasure hunter created for the review of Whitehack, but where Whitehack has Classes—broad Classes, but Classes nonetheless—Macchiato Monsters has none and is even more open in terms of character design and possibilities. Both though, enable Referee and players alike to start world building at the point of contact, of character creation.

Thurston Smyth
Strength 08 Intelligence 17 Wisdom 11 
Dexterity 14 Constitution 07 Charisma 16 

Hit Dice: d8 Hit Points: 7

Trait: Sage of the Last University
Magic Training—Illuminate the Path, Soporific Field 
Martial Training (Master of the Whip)

Languages: Draconic, Elvish

Equipment: Infaillible Darts (damage Δ10), whip (d4), Hide tunic and fur hat Δ4, Funeral urns worth silver Δ6, a noble title (Rais, Viscount, Duchess, Khan...) and a bodyguard (Δ10), and jar of snail soup Δ6, old ox, rolled up carpet, 2 sacks, crowbar.

Mechanically, Macchiato Monsters uses the roll under a statistic mechanic, with the results of one being a critical success and twenty being a fumble. It also uses the Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition and The Black Hack. A trait, whether that is an occupation, a background, a faction, and so on, will not give a character any bonuses in combat, but for non-combat circumstances, it will grant a character the Advantage for a roll or enable him to undertake actions that another character would not be able to.

Combat is designed to be flexible and simple. First, it is possible to set up situations to a combatant’s benefit, but there is always an element of tactical risk to such a situation. Thus, it requires a roll against an appropriate statistic—for example, against Intelligence or Wisdom to determine a good ambush site or placement of some defences—and if successful, the combatant would have an advantage the following turn. However, fail and the combatant will have disadvantage the following turn, and perhaps other negative effects. For example, the ambushers might not be in position when the attackers appear and so cannot concentrate their fire and are in the open they are attacked. Attack rolls are made against Strength for mêlée attacks, Dexterity for missile attacks. Damage is rolled by weapon die type, but with disadvantage if the weapon die type is larger than the attacker’s Hit Die type. Similarly, if an attacker is faced by an opponent whose Hit Dice are higher than his or opponents whose total Hit Dice are greater than the party’s, then the attack is rolled with disadvantage.

Instead of Armour Class, Macchiato Monsters uses a die type for any armour worn. When a character is first attacked and hit, his player rolls the die type for the armour worn. This determines the number of points of damage that the armour will stop that fight. It is quick, it is brutal, and to an extent cinematic with elements like shields being smashed or fried to stop overwhelming damage from one source. Similarly, it is easy to handle complex actions such as escaping a burning, collapsing building whilst grabbing the Lost Proclamations of Oshun the Minor.

Much like Whitehack, magic in Macchiato Monsters is freeform, player-Referee negotiated, and deleterious to the character’s Hit Points. Only a critical result of a statistic check will the caster not lose any Hit Points. A more generically worded spell, instantaneous casting, extra range and targets, increased duration, and so on, will increase the Hit Point cost, but similar to Whitehack, the Hit Point cost cast can be alleviated by using a focus, reagents, and materials—as well as if the caster is using specialist magic or using faith, depending if the caster is a specialist or has faith. Even if the spell fails, the caster can choose to roll the Chaos die, a twelve-sided die, on the spell mishap table. The clever thing is though, the negotiation process between Referee and player as to the nature and Hit Point cost of the spell enables the spell-casting player to establish a cost of that spell when his character wants to cast it again. Do this a few times with different spells and variations in their effect and casting, and what the player character has is his own personal, even unique spellbook.
For example, Thurston Smyth is being chased by his arch-rival, Ronson Ballard, who also wants the Lost Proclamations of Oshun the Minor. Ballard has persuaded a tribe of Kobolds that he speaks for their god since he can shoot fire from his hands and together they are chasing Smyth as he runs away. Smyth decides that now is the time to cast Soporific Field. The extra targets and wide field add two Hit Points to the base single Hit Point cost, as do the higher Hit Dice of the targets and the instantaneous cast. So four Hit Points. Fortunately Smyth has this and can use his magic focus, a wand to lower the cost by a Hit Point to just three. Unfortunately, Smyth’s player fails the check against his Intelligence, but desperate to get away, the player calls upon the Chaos of magic…! The result of the Chaos Risk die is a twelve—and BAM! The effect is to double the area, number of targets, or area of the spell. Thurston could not hope for a better result as all of the chasing Kobolds as well as Ballard suddenly collapse. A bit tired and exhausted, Smyth turns round and walks over to a sleeping Ballard and proceeds to rifle through his pockets…The Black Hack added another mechanic for handling consumables. It gives each Consumable a die type, for example, a flask of oil has a Usage Die of d6, and then handles their use as dice rolls. When each is used, its die type is rolled and if the result is one or two, the Usage Die is stepped down to a lower die type. In the case of the flask of oil, from d6 to d4. After the d4, the Consumable is consumed. Macchiato Monsters uses this mechanic, but applies it on a wider scale and exacerbates its effects. So food, armour in combat, faith and reagents when casting magic, missiles, holy water, even followers (after all, they can get tired!), can all be handled using a similar mechanic, called the Risk die. When the Risk die is rolled, instead of being stepped down to the next die type on a one or two, it is stepped down on a result of a one, two, or three. Further, the result of a one is worse than a two, which is worse than a three, and so on, for narrating the effects of the step down. A maximum result on the Risk die indicates a lucky break, though what that means is up to the players and the Referee to decide.

Macchiato Monsters steps up its use of the Risk die to handle weather, applying a die type according to the season and then when a Risk die is stepped down the weather gets worse. A similar mechanic is used for wilderness encounters, the die type varying according to the terrain type, whilst the Risk die is also used for off-screen expeditions, carousing and nights out, building and controlling domains—like an assassins’ guild or a wizard’s tower, the stability of a region, and more. Notably, the Risk die is used to handle money, so one character might possess a bag of silver Δ6 and use that to purchase a good quality black powder pistol, whilst another might have a bag of gold Δ6 and spend it to take a luxury room at a hotel. Each time a character makes a purchase, the Risk die is rolled and in effect, really only spends the money if the die is stepped down… It is also possible to split, merge, and exchange such bags of coin, but these rules, as clever as they are, do feel counter-intuitive, mostly because they make something which should be a number into an abstract. There is nothing to say that they will not work, but when it comes to the financial aspects of the roleplaying game, they take some adjusting to. In addition, Macchiato Monsters provides simple rules for handling monsters as well as a list of ‘Fifty Shades of Macchiato Monsters’, and then tables and tables for creating townsfolk, plots, factions, adventure locations, creatures, items, and treasures. 

Physically, Macchiato Monsters is a neat, tidy, and readable black and white book. Although lightly illustrated, its contents are neatly organised and laid out. It is a pity that the book is not available in a ‘lie flat’ book as the Referee will find herself rolling on a lot of tables during play and being able to play directly from the book would have made it easier.

Of course, there is risk involved in dungeoneering—and to a varying degree, there always has been, ever since the publication of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. As with Whitehack it hands Referee and players alike a high degree of freedom in what they play and the world in which the characters adventure, but Macchiato Monsters makes the degree of risk in not just dungeoneering, but in every aspect of adventuring, travelling, organising, hiring, and more, explicit in the use of the Risk die. It lies at the heart of Macchiato Monsters, using it as a means to drive stories and to push the adventurers to desperation as bad events come about as Risk dice are stepped down and ‘resources’ are essentially expended.

Macchiato Monsters: Rules for Adventures In a Dungeonverse You Build Together could have been simply an amalgam of The Black Hack and Whitehack, but it is very much its own take upon the best elements of both. In particular, its application of the Risk die makes for much more fraught playing experience and makes adventuring ‘risky’ once again.

I finally have some solid information about this 1980s rubber fantasty warrior thanks to friend of the blog Daton and a recent ebay find.  I have him in my Misc Unpainted Figures post but it is time to take a little deeper look.  He came in a box of loose figures called Warrior Scented Erasers that is very similar to the CH Muscle Warriors box.  If they are actually warrior scented I assume that means they smells like sweat, blood and dirty a$$.  

He also came in a carded Ja Ru rack toy called Power Queen Dragon Guard which is very similar to Ja Ru's Hercules Hero of Strength line.   Then there are the Dragon Master Puffy Stickers sets which seem to show him in multiple stickers.  I would love to find out if there are more Dragon Master figures or products (maybe a game or a failed cartoon).  
I only own the first picture. The other pictures will be removed if requested by their owners.


Photo from imgur. 
Photo from an ebay auction.


Photo from an ebay auction.


Photo from imgur.

































































































































































Photo from imgur.

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


—oOo—

1959 marks the publication of two classic wargames. One is Diplomacy: A Game of International Intrigue, Trust, and Treachery, the other is Risk: The Continental Game. Although they are both set in past times, one Napoleonic, one Edwardian, they could not be more different. One is card and dice driven and has been hugely successful, probably the most successful mass market wargame ever published, but the other is entirely trust and decision driven. The former is Risk, the latter Diplomacy. Both are sixty years old in 2019.

Published in 1959 by Games Research Inc. and later Avalon Hill, but now Wizards of the Coast under the Avalon Hill brand, Diplomacy is the grandfather of grand strategy games, an exploration of European national and political tensions prior to the Great War. A game of trust and negotiation, it appeals to the historian and the diplomat, whether that is the armchair historian or diplomat—like you and I, or the actual historian or diplomat—famously John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. It is a game of decision and trust and negotiation, there being no dice or luck involved whatsoever. Designed for two to seven players aged twelve and over, in Diplomacy each player will control one of the great European powers—Austria-Hungary, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey—and will have under his command a number of armies and fleets. He will also hold his traditional or home provinces that his country held in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Between them are several neutral provinces, such as Norway, Tunisia, Portugal, Bulgaria, and so on. Switzerland is also neutral, but cannot be entered by any army. Some of these provinces, both home and neutral, are supply centres. Possession of these enable a power to build another army or fleet, likewise loss of these will force a power to disband an army or fleet. There are a total of thirty four such supply centres on Diplomacy’s map of Europe. If one player or power controls eighteen of these, then he wins the game. Winning though, is far from easy, and can take anywhere from between four and twelve hours—Diplomacy is a long game and it takes dedication to play.

Diplomacy is played out year by year, with two turns—Spring and Fall (Autumn)—per year beginning in 1901. On his turn, a player writes orders to each of his fleets and armies. These are to Hold (stay in position), Move (to an adjacent province), Support (support another army or fleet in moving into a province), or Convoy (a fleet transports an army across a sea province to another land province). Once written down, the orders from all powers are resolved simultaneously and this sets up the primary difficulty in taking provinces. All units are of equal strength or value—there is no rolling of dice or means to determine the strength of an attack or unit—and so when two opposing units attempt to capture the same province or one attempts to force another from a province, nothing happens. To successfully attack and hold a province, a player needs to support the attacking unit with another unit in another province. This can be a unit belonging to the attacking player or that of an ally. If successful, the defending unit can be forced to retreat, the attacking unit taking the province.

These orders are issued twice a year, but after the Fall turn, if a player has captured a Supply Centre, he can build a new army or fleet in one of his home provinces. If a player has lost a Supply Centre, he loses a unit. Play proceeds like this, from year to year until one player or power captures the eighteen supply centres necessary to win the game.

Now mechanically, this sounds simple enough, and it is. Within a turn or two though, as the powers send their armies and fleets out to capture first the supply centres in neutral territories they will clash with rival powers. Then, once the neutral supply centres have been captured, the powers will be brought into direct confrontation, and at this point, a stalemate is likely to ensue… In order to break such a stalemate, the powers and thus the players will have to co-operate and form alliances, much like the Entente Cordiale between France and Great Britain and the Triple Alliance formed between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. This is where Diplomacy begins to get interesting, challenging, and duplicitous.

Writing the orders for each turn—Spring and Fall (Autumn)—per year takes a few minutes, but a fifteen minute phase is allowed before this for negotiation between players. During this time, they can negotiate what they will write as their respective orders, reach agreements, form alliances, and so on. This might be to support an allied player’s move into a particular province, hold against an enemy, allow a convoy move for an ally, and so on. Forming alliances makes their member players very powerful, but the question is, how far can they trust each other? For not only is it within the rules of Diplomacy to reach agreements and make alliances, it is within the rules to break them as well. A betrayal and a breaking of an alliance at the right time can break a stalemate and hopefully give the betrayer the advantage to defeat his former ally, who is unlikely to make the same mistake of trusting the betrayer twice...

It is this capacity to break alliances, typically to the detriment of one member over another, to betray the trust between allies, which gives Diplomacy its primary reputation, that of being a game which breaks friendships. That though, is really down to the friendship rather than the game itself, because the game can be played by more mature players who will not necessarily put their friendships to the test by playing Diplomacy. By modern standards, if you can play The Resistance or Battlestar Galactica, both with built traitor mechanics, then Diplomacy should not be so of a test of friendships. But arguably, those games have traitors built into them by design and from the start, so the players know what to expect and can blame the game’s mechanics as much as the player betraying them. In Diplomacy is there no inbuilt mechanic for there being a traitor and it comes about through play and duplicity rather than anything else. Further, because of the trust placed in fellow allies, the betrayal of trust is likely to be all that more painful…

Nevertheless, forging the trust between players and building alliances is very much part of the play and the skill in Diplomacy. For it is a game built around negotiation and interaction as much as it is ordering fleets and armies across Europe—and in fact the need to make those order calls for that negotiation and interaction. 

In the sixty years since it was first published, there have been many editions of Diplomacy, published by many different publishers. The current version is the fiftieth anniversary edition published by Wizards of the Coast as part of its Avalon Hill imprint. It comes with eighty-four army counters and eighty-four fleet counts for the seven great power; one-hundred-and-forty-seven control markers to indicate who has control of the various supply centres; a large game board depicting Europe marked with the provinces held by the great powers at game’s start and the neutral provinces; a pad of maps for marking up orders; and the rulebook.

All of the components are solid, although it would have been nice if the armies and fleets had been wooden rather than the sturdy cardboard they are. The map is very clear and easy to read. As is the rulebook, although it would have been nice if some colour had been included in the maps used to show the examples of play. Although the rules are simple, time is taken to go through them with plenty of examples and explanations. There is also advice on how to play with fewer players and an example play through of the first seven turns of the game. This is a typical race for the supply centres in neutral territory. It is a pity that there are no illustrations for these moves, but it encourages the player to act them in order to see how the game plays.

Diplomacy is a game which demands the full seven players—it is not as fun with fewer—and the time in which to play it to its final outcome. Of course, few of us have that opportunity as often as we would like and almost from almost the very start, the play of Diplomacy was conducted via the post and in fanzines, then later online, so that games can be conducted at a more leisurely pace with greater scope for negotiation (and betrayal). Its age, its theme, and its set-up means that there has probably been more written about Diplomacy and how it can be played than any other game, except Chess (which of course, is centuries older). By modern standards, at the height of the Eurogame, Diplomacy is too confrontational, too much the wargame. It could be argued that from the start, though not necessarily later on in the game, its situation places the players and their powers finely balanced against each other. Breaking that is part of winning the game and even though Diplomacy is not strictly a wargame, it is not a Eurogame either. 

The lightness of the mechanics and the historical set-up, means that Diplomacy has the capacity to be something more. As a game of confrontation and negotiation between the European powers prior to the Great War, it has the capacity to work as an exploration of the nationalism, the politics, aims, and international relations between the powers. There is scope here for roleplaying too, as the players take on the roles of the Kings, Emperors, Sultans, Czars, and Presidents leading the great powers , and by increasing the number of players, perhaps their various ministers and generals. Such scope lies outside of Diplomacy as it comes in the box and arguably it would also require at least one Game Master.

Again by modern standards, Diplomacy is a game design with flaws. Its ts play is too long and by its very nature, will lead to player elimination who will have nothing to do whilst the surviving powers jockey for position and then confront each other. These are likely to be contributing factors to the game not being as popular as it once was. Another factor may well be the theme to Diplomacy, that of the great powers of Europe prior to the Great War, no longer having the significance that it once had, as those events were within living memory when the game was first published. And yet, Diplomacy: A Game of International Intrigue, Trust, and Treachery remains a classic because it emphasises the negotiation and interaction aspects of playing it as being key to the wargame aspect and mastering that is the path to victory—eventually. 

Mark Taormino is living the dream.  He is working on producing his next module in the Maximum Mayhem Dungeons series, this time it's module #7: Dread Swamp of the Banshee.  This time the adventure is written by author Joe Pearce and it looks great!

Maximum Mayhem Dungeons #7: Dread Swamp of the Banshee


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marktaormino/maximum-mayhem-dungeons-7-dread-swamp-of-the-banshee?ref=theotherside

It looks like the same sort of insanity that his other adventures feature.  Old-school maps and adventures and way over the top gonzo fun.

Plus you can pick up all his past adventures as well.  Combined they make a great campaign that your characters will never survive.


Check out the review I did for his first five adventure and monster book.

Mark know his Kickstarters.  He gets them done and he gets them out to you. I trust Mark.

There is no denying the continued and growing popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, with it having appeared on the television series Stranger Things and it no longer being seen as a hobby solely the preserve of typically male, nerdy teenagers and young adults. Yet as acceptable a hobby as roleplaying and in particular, playing Dungeons & Dragons has become, getting into the hobby is still a daunting prospect. Imagine if you will, being faced with making your first character for your first game of Dungeons & Dragons? Then what monsters will face? What adventures will you have? For nearly all of us, answering these questions are not all that far from being a challenge, for all started somewhere and we all had to make that first step—making our first character, entering our first dungeon, and encountering our first monster. As well written as both Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the Player’s Handbook are, both still present the prospective reader and player with a lot of choices, but without really answering these questions in an easy to read and reference fashion.

Step forward the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ published by Ten Speed Press. This is a series of introductory guides to Dungeons & Dragons, designed as primers to various aspects of the world’s leading roleplaying game. Each in the series is profusely illustrated, no page consisting entirely of text. The artwork is all drawn from and matches the style of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, so as much as it provides an introduction to the different aspects of the roleplaying game covered in each book in the series, it provides an introduction to the look of the roleplaying game, so providing continuity between the other books in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ and the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the core rulebooks. This use of art and the digest size of the book means that from the start, every entry in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ is an attractive little package.

The first in the series, Warriors & Weapons provided an introduction to the various Races of Dungeons & Dragons, the martial character Classes, and the equipment they use. Second is not Wizards & Spells, the companion to Warriors & Weapons which covers Clerics, Sorcerers, and Wizards, or indeed any of the other spellcasting character types in Dungeons & Dragons. Instead the second book in the series is Monsters & Creatures. As the title suggests, this presents an introduction to the monsters, creatures, and animals that the prospective player may well have his character encounter on his adventures, many of them—like the Beholder, the Mind Flayer, the Owl Bear, and more—iconic to Dungeons & Dragons.

The thirty or so entries in Monsters & Creatures are divided according to their environment. So under Caverns & Dark Places there are entries for the Beholder, the Carrion Crawler, and the Myconid and under Forests, Mountains & Other Terrain, there are entries for the Centaur, the Sprite, and the Treant, as well as six types of Giants. Banshee, Skeletons, and Vampires can be found in Moors, Bogs, & Boneyards, whilst the Aboleth, the Dragon Turtle, and the Merrow are found in Oceans, Lakes, & Waterways. Lastly, the Griffon and the Pegasus are sighted Mountain Peaks & Open Sky along with Dragons of all colours… Every entry is given a double page spread, the left hand page showing an illustration of the creature or monster, a listing of its special powers, a description of its size, and an indication of its Danger Level, from ‘0’ or harmless to ‘5’ for really nasty. On the right hand page there is a description of the monster or creature and its lair, accompanied by a list of things to do or not do when dealing with it.

So for the iconic Beholder, the given Danger Level is ‘4’ and its Special Powers, from Telekinesis and Enervation to Disintegration and Petrification, are described eye stalk by eye stalk. The description is fairly broad, as much hints as straight facts, since after all, this Monsters & Creatures is not the Monster Manual. Their lairs are given as remote caves or abandoned ruins, their floors often covered in the equipment and treasure of adventurers who faced the Beholder and were killed. The advice when facing a Beholder is that the adventurers should fight magic with magic, distract the Beholder, and get in close inside the range of their eyestalks, but never ignore the feeling of being watched and never stay put!

Monsters & Creatures includes a little extra beyond just the thirty or so entries. After a select few, an entry is given for a legendary threat, one of the famous beings from Dungeons & Dragons cannon. So for the Dragons, this is Tiamat, The Queen of Evil Dragons, so Monsters & Creatures also serves as an introduction to the campaign, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and for the Vampires, it is Count Strahd von Zarovich, so this book also works as an introduction to the campaign, Curse of Strahd. These legendary creatures are foes that the adventurers are unlikely to face for a very long time, but they are ones to be whispered about in hushed tones… Then there the encounter descriptions after every section, such as Half-Orc Barbarian’s encounter in a Myconid Colony who can sense an action she took in another colony years past. This short piece of fiction sets up a question or situation which the reader can answer or deal with by referring back to the entries earlier in the tome. These are a nice break from the somewhat comparatively dry monster descriptions, posing the reader with a situation that his adventurer might face in the future.

Just as in Warriors & Weapons, the last words in Monsters & Creatures are some last words about building a hero, that the reader is on his first steps to composing his adventurer’s story. It opens up a little to ask the player to wonder about the other heroes his character will adventure alongside, what and where his adventures take place, and of course, why? It explains a bit more about the play of Dungeons & Dragons, so serving as a light primer before the player gets to the table.

There are just two issues with Monsters & Creatures—one minor, one not so minor. The minor issue is the inclusion of the Flumph as an entry. It is just a little too obscure, a bit too odd to sit alongside the other entries. The not so minor issue is that the fact that the book includes an anachronism or two when it comes to describing the size of the monsters and creatures in the book. A Treant is described as being taller than a logging truck, whilst the Storm Giant is described as being taller than a London bus. The inclusion of such modernisms breaks the verisimilitude of the book, making very much a reference work out of the game when it could have been a reference work both out of the game and in the game.

Physically, Monsters & Creatures is an attractive little hardback. It is bright, it is breezy, and it shows a prospective player what his character might face, both in the art and the writing. Further, the art shows lots of adventuring scenes which can only spur the prospective player’s imagination.

Now obviously, Monsters & Creatures is designed to showcase Dungeons & Dragons and introduce the prospective player to what his character might encounter. Now because some of the entries in the volume are particular to Dungeon & Dragons, it means that not all of the content of Monsters & Creatures is quite so useful in other roleplaying games, but nevertheless, it would an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons-style retroclones, though in its look, it is brighter and breezier than the style and tone of the typical fantasy roleplaying game from the Old School Renaissance.

Warriors & Weapons did a decent job of introducing players to the martial Classes. Likewise, Monsters & Creatures does a good job of introducing the prospective player to just a tiny, but often iconic, few of the monsters and creatures in Dungeons & Dragons. It is though, more of a general reference work, perhaps more useful than Warriors & Weapons, since its contents pertain to the play of Dungeons & Dragons rather than the creation of characters in readiness for that play. This makes it an even better book to have at the table during play, since its contents can serve as the legends and the folklore that a player character in a fantasy world might have learned about said monsters and creatures as he was growing up. Even if not that, then the readers for whom Monsters & Creatures is written for, are at least going to wowed by its contents and perhaps be fascinated by them to want to know more about Dungeons & Dragons. 

Again, Monsters & Creatures is a bright and easy read, the next part of what should serve as a light introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. One that nicely works as a gift as much as it does a useful reference work.

Reviews / November 14, 2019

Italianamerican
Directed by Martin Scorsese, 1974

After Martin Scorsese burst onto the scene with the one-two social realist punch of 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, he produced an ode to the milieu from which he sprang, a briefer-than-feature-length trip to his parents’ walk-up apartment in Little Italy for Sunday macaroni and gravy: 1974’s Italianamerican. The film is many things: an obvious love letter to Scorsese’s parents and to Italian culture, something of an anthropological expedition investigating his own roots, and ultimately an examination of how the combination of higher education, cultural assimilation, rejection of religion, and flight from urban ethnic enclaves to the suburbs changed the children of these first-generation European immigrants. Scorsese’s 1974 trip back to his folks’ house exposes the Italian-American experience in all its contradictions and quandaries: in gender relations, race relations, conceptions of social class, family life, and nostalgia and memory.

The relationship between (Luciano) Charles Scorsese and his wife Catherine (née Cappa) is obviously the center of the film. While Martin does appear and does prompt questions, Italianamerican is best when we’re watching the four-decades-married couple squabble and bicker and tease each other. One notable piece of Italian-American culture that emerges from the film is the complex web of gender roles and relationships that characterize the Italian family. Charles deals in a few stereotypical sexist behaviors that one might expect of someone of his generation, but it’s clear that Catherine (and by extension Italian-American wives and mothers) isn’t having any of it. One exchange on cooking (a topic that comes up again and again in the film) says it all; Charles explains with a smile that he doesn’t cook because “I’m not supposed to… it’s not my line,” while simultaneously claiming that, even so, men are the best chefs: “It’s been known that a man is a better cook than a woman any time.” Immediately, Catherine snaps back with a simple, “Then why aren’t you doing the cooking then!”

But ultimately both Charles and Catherine recognize the purely enormous amount of unpaid labor that Italian mothers had to do back in their day: cooking and cleaning for nine kids, all while taking on outside jobs that could be done at home, like sewing piecework: “Our poor mothers worked.” Modern conveniences such as washing machines have banished much of this drudgery, but both of the elder Scorseses seem humbled by the sacrifices their own mothers had to make. Charles, especially, is touching as he remembers his late mother being unwilling to suffer fools and quite capable of defending herself in any conflict: “As far as my mother goes, my mother was a strong woman… If she had to say something, she told you and that was it and you couldn’t answer her. My mother, she was a real whip.” After this statement, Charles’s hand goes to his mouth (as does Martin’s, I noticed, an uncanny example of familial mirroring), obviously choked up at the memory. Italian-American femininity, with its focus on being strong, being tough, being protective of one’s children, being able to hold one’s own in an argument, was born on the mean streets and tenements of major cities all over the Eastern seaboard in the early 20th century and most definitely would not have jibed with the contemporary WASP image of how a bourgeois woman, wife, and mother should act.

Mentioning the particular social environment in Lower Manhattan that housed and sheltered waves of Southern and Eastern European (and East Asian) immigrants in the early 20th century, it’s clear that even as ethnic groups formed their own enclaves, they were forced to deal with different groups as a matter of course in America’s “melting pot.” Charles recalls the way Little Italy and the Jewish enclaves on the Lower East Side would find themselves side-by-side in workplaces, public spaces (like the pushcarts and public markets on Delancey Street), and restaurants (Charles is insistent with Martin on making sure he notes that the home of “the original potato knish” is Schimmel’s.) “All together, Jewish and Italians, they all worked together,” Charles says, as he remembers lighting stoves and lamps for observant Jews on the Sabbath.

As Charles remembers the pushcarts, Martin cannily cuts in images of the Lower East Side, Little Italy, and Chinatown as they stood in the then-present of 1974: it’s still a multi-ethnic neighborhood with pushcarts and kids playing in the streets, demonstrating the continuity of four generations of immigrant communities in New York City. And it’s not just fellow white immigrants who the Scorseses identify as being unfairly treated by the power structures of the time. “People were afraid to walk through [Chinatown]; you used to hear so many stories about it, but it wasn’t true!” Catherine fairly screams. (Charles is admittedly a bit more ambivalent about Chinatown, but Catherine holds her own.) Throughout Italianamerican, Catherine demonstrates a very ingrained sense of racial solidarity, likely due to the awareness that Italians had been on the end of that exact kind of discrimination when they were “fresh off the boat.” Even when Charles makes a comment about how the preexisting Irish population of their neighborhood systematically mistreated the more recent immigrant arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, Catherine also makes sure to make a point of disagreeing with Charles’s intimation that the number of bars in the neighborhood indicated that the Irish of the time were all drunks.

With that in mind, it’s clear that there is some anxiety among the elder Scorseses’ generation around their immigrant identity and assimilation into the predominant American WASP culture. Early on in the film, Charles spends some time taking Catherine to task for “putting on”: elevating her tone from her customary lower Manhattan accent and mannerisms. After being hectored about this “code-switching,” Catherine responds in a broad New York Italian accent, shouting from off-screen: “I don’t know what you mean, Charlie!” “Talk the way you’re talkin’ to me now, that’s what I mean,” Charles responds with a knowing smile. This anxiety about assimilation and forgetting one’s origins in Italianamerican helps set the stage for so many of the subsequent conversations that the couple conduct about class, ethnicity, and making it in America. Throughout the film, the elder Scorseses discuss numerous gradual processes of cultural assimilation: for example, while Charles’s family didn’t believe in having a (American) Christmas tree when he was young in the 1920s, it’s clear from the Scorsese family photos from the 1950s that Martin grew up with American traditions like hanging stockings at Christmastime (from a radiator, not a fireplace). In a story Catherine tells about her father shaving his handlebar mustache after a week-long work assignment in New Jersey, which scared the kids because he looked so different upon his return to Manhattan, there floats the unspoken possibility that he was asked to shave the Old World facial hair for reasons of the job itself. (Speaking of facial hair, there are a couple of passive-aggressive generational pokes at Martin’s thick beard from both his mother and his father.) The most striking moment surrounding assimilation is the tale Catherine tells about her father’s citizenship interview, where Catherine’s sister had to act as interpreter; as the immigration agent’s reaction to the elder Cappa’s inability to speak fluent English is one of shame and disapproval: “Why that’s terrible!” Family lore insists that Catherine’s father used this opportunity to show off a little of the English he had picked up during his time in America, telling the immigrant agent, “Go and fuck yourself.”

There are also omnipresent reminders of class. The traditional tale of European immigration to America is the idea of fulfilling “the American dream,” usually by making one’s material fortune in the new land of opportunity. Charles notes the advice he received to not work for someone else, and instead work for yourself: “You’ll always have money in your pocket.” The hard times, the sacrifices, the traumatic journey to America itself (Catherine insists her mother was so scared of the prospect of a transatlantic sea journey that she had to be tricked onto the boat): these stories clearly loom large in the Scorseses’ family narrative, as with many European immigrants of the first generation. Details about the grimness of the tenement apartments and poverty abound in the elder Scorseses’ telling, but Catherine also luxuriates in the moments when her generation began to find work and make “real” money; the story of one of her brothers starting off as a messenger boy for quintessentially old-money WASP investment firm JP Morgan so that they can afford Christmas presents and “a proper tree” contrasts with Charles’s tale of his folks not wanting an American Christmas tree. Occasionally, it’s hinted that Charles’s family was a little bit poorer than Catherine’s; Catherine notes in a conversation about making wine that her family made theirs in the basement instead of the kitchen like Charles’s family did. Catherine makes repeated reference to her family’s wanting their house to look less like a tenement, citing the desire to “better yourself,” hinting that Charles’s allegation that she was “putting on” at the outset of the film might have been at least a little correct.

The perfect confluence of these issues around class consciousness and assimilation lie in the Scorseses’ tale of finally taking their long-promised honeymoon. Instead of their scuttled original plan to visit Niagara Falls when they were first married, they go (one imagines thanks to Martin’s success and largesse) on a two-week trip to the Italian peninsula where they visit family in Sicily and see Rome and Venice as American tourists forty years after their wedding. It’s notable that while Catherine obviously enjoyed all the trappings and privileges of the return to Italy, she also feels intense guilt about the poverty in the countryside that was still in evidence in the 1970s: “The land is so beautiful, but there’s no work over there!” She nearly weeps when she thinks about a young boy who wanted to be taken back to America with her, and makes a poignant Freudian slip in saying that she wished she could take him back on “the boat” before correcting to “the plane.” Catherine’s proximity to the immigrant experience of her mother allows for an empathetic realization: that her ancestors’ emigration was an escape from real endemic generational poverty, and that her position of privilege as a comfortable Italian-American on a two-week tour of Italy will not allow her to save the descendants of those who were left behind. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but it demonstrates that those memories of her ancestors left her with something tangible: a lasting, innate awareness of right and wrong.

It’s hard for me to remain completely unbiased about Italianamerican, of course, mostly because the Scorseses’ apartment, in its studied and cluttered Old World decor combined with mid-century Italian-American touches (plastic wrap covering the “nice couch” in the living room) reminds me vividly of my own grandparents’ apartment in East Boston in the 1970s and ’80s (as does Catherine’s insistence on vacuuming and cleaning up as soon as Martin is done shooting the film; my own grandmother’s obsessive cleanliness is recounted in family lore every time my father recalls being whacked with a broom to get him to clean up after himself). As examples of members of the generation that decided not to leave the old neighborhood for the suburbs like their late Silent and Baby Boomer kids did, the elder Scorseses are indicative of a bifurcation that was overwhelmingly common among ethnic whites in the Cold War era. In that move to the suburbs—under the larger rubric of “white flight“—came a concomitant distance from one’s neighbors, a certain financial and material security upon entering the American middle class, and a forgetting of one’s origins, both cultural and class, which led in many cases to an inevitable shift among many non-WASP whites to the political right. But those Italian-Americans of Catherine and Charles’s generation, still situated in the old neighborhood, didn’t completely forget that, once, we “all worked together.”

This awareness of the solidarity of the old neighborhood finds its most powerful expression in the way both the Scorseses tell their stories for Martin’s camera. In the final third of the film, with Sunday dinner being picked at over the dinner table, the Scorseses remember how important telling “fantastic stories” was in an era before the radio and the television, purely for purposes of entertainment. (It’s no surprise that the role Catherine eventually became famous for, as Joe Pesci’s character Tommy’s mother in 1990’s GoodFellas, involves her telling just such a humorous tale from the old country about a cuckolded husband, a story type with ancient origins in Italian literature and culture.) One of Catherine’s stories in Italianamerican, which touches upon the spooky and the supernatural matrix of the Old Country, oddly becomes an inadvertent parable for all the class anxieties expressed throughout the film. In this story, a mysterious visitor clad in silver appears, Communion-like, at the foot of Catherine’s mother’s bed back in Italy while she is nursing a young child—the next generation—and asks her to “hit me with something” to receive great wealth. Catherine’s mother, petrified by the visitation, hesitates, clutching her child (destined to be an American) to her breast. Years later, a trove of silver coins is found in the home after they’d left; family members, remembering the story, blame her for not lashing out at the mysterious alien stranger and becoming rich.

In a way, though, that sort of a devil’s bargain is real, and is expressed in the way the Italians, the Poles, the Greeks, and many other non-WASPs “became white” in the second half of the 20th century. And oral storytelling like this—from generation to generation—helps to convey important cultural messages that might otherwise be forgotten in the stultifying white conformity of the red-lined, middle-class suburbs. The stories our elders choose to tell and hand down are vitally important to not forgetting our origins as well as remembering and preserving moral lessons—lessons of familial loyalty, of brave, hard-working matriarchs, even lessons of class and cross-ethnic solidarity (even if neither of the Scorseses speak in such blatantly political terms) purchased at great cost. If every Italian-American MAGA-swallowing stronzo in 2019 who talks about their ancestors immigrating “the right way” could really listen to what the elder Scorseses were saying in Italianamerican about solidarity—solidarity with laborers, with recent immigrants, with working mothers, with the ethnic “Others” in the neighborhood, a sense of community hard won, prompted by real harassment and oppression of their own ancestors at the hands of cops and immigration officials—they might begin to understand why they’re wrong, and why they’ve always been wrong, to accept the poisoned pill of American kyriarchical “whiteness.” Martin Scorsese knew, even as a hungry 31-year-old filmmaker—and he remembers today, 45 years after Italianamerican was released—that the stories we choose to tell and to preserve matter, that the voices we choose to amplify with our privilege matter, and that even in a family lark like Italianamerican, that belief shines through, like a trove of silver treasure.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

Yesterday I reviewed the new B/X Gangbusters game and talked about its potential due to its Basic-era roots.  I stand behind that and a recent dive into some of my favorite Basic-era games supports this.  So let's see how well Gangbusters, B/X edition Plays Well With Others.



Realms of Crawling Chaos
Both are built on similar B/X designs.  Realms of Crawling Chaos adds Lovecraftian Horrors to your B/X Gangbusters games.  Both also support the same era of play, more or less, and have similar offerings in terms of playing normal humans. In fact, adding Realms of Crawling Chaos can add an edge to your "Educated" characters they might not normally have. 

Of course, at this point, you might ask why not just play Call of Cthulhu or d20 Call of  Cthulhu.  The answer, of course, is to be able to play this as a B/X game.

Amazing Adventures
AA is a Pulp-era game based in and on the 1930s; so about a decade later.  But there is still a lot in this game that would be helpful to the Gangbusters player or Judge. Not to belabor it, but the are equipment lists here that have different items that the GB Basic book.  The Amazing Adventures classes also give the GB Judge some go ideas for playing Powered Characters.

Basic Psionics Handbook
Moving further afield we have Richard LeBlanc's Basic Psionics Handbook.   While psionics have a "complicated" relationship to Fantasy games, they seem to work just fine in semi-modern ones.  In particular, a psionic wild talent would fit well into a GB game.  Let's not forget that the 1920s was also the time of Harry Houdini and his magic shows.  In real life he was a debunker of claims of the supernatural, but who knows what he was doing in YOUR world.

This along with Realms of the Crawling Chaos gives you a Lovecraftian style game that is less "Call of Cthulhu" and more "Cast a Deadly Spell".
I want to try this with a hard-boiled private eye that used to be a boxer and has seen a little too much magic.  I'll have to name him Robert Howard Lovecraft.

Starships & Spacemen 2e
Moving even further out from Psionics we have another one from Goblinnoid Games, Starships & Spacemen.  How does this one work?  Glad you asked!  One of my favorite Star Trek Episodes is "A Piece of the Action" where the crew of the Enterprise beam down to Sigma Iota II to investigate the crash of the Horizon from 100 years earlier.  They discover that the Iotians, a very creative and intelligent humanoid race, have recreated Chicago from the 1920s based on the book "Chicago Mobs of the Twenties", which had been published in (their version of) 1992.  The Iotians recreated their entire civilization based on this book.  At the end of the episode, it is revealed that Dr. McCoy misplaced his communicator.  Kirk and Spock state they will analyze the technology and that by the time they come back they could be the Federation.



There was an attempt to do a sequel to this by Michael Piller for TNG and some comics.  For me though, it was a throw-away section in the FASA TNG Officer's Manual that when the Federation came back to Sigma Iota II that they found a fully functional Federation style Space Station waiting for them.  Frankly, I would use that in a heartbeat for my own BlackStar games.  Maybe even adopt Piller's idea that this was a Federation, with the morality of the Chicago gangs.
It sounds like a lot of fun really.  I'd steal more ideas from FASA Trek for this too, including the interim uniforms they were using for the Enterprise-C era.   I will have to come back to this.

There is a lot more you could do with Gangbusters and the vast library of Basic-era B/X compatible material out there.

Illustration from "The Beauty and the Beast", 1970

What I wanted to say ... with self-expression, 1970

Figures, 1970

Frog King - from "The Beauty and the Beast" series



Untitled, 1971

Second illustration from "The Beauty and the Beast", 1970



From Series "The Beauty and the Beast", 1995

Erotic Representations

The Big Fight, 1979

Most artworks found at Dorotheum.

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: A Colour in a Dark Age

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Jonathan Baxter

Setting: Cthulhu Dark Ages or Cthulhu Through the Ages: Guidelines for Playing Call of Cthulhu in Seven Different Eras
Product: Scenario
What You Get: 28.29 MB nineteen-page, full colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: In the Dark Ages there is only one colour between them.
Plot Hook: A draining experience could be spreading...
Plot Development: Warring factions, cowed villagers, heresy, religious persecution, a siege, and a cookbook.
Plot Support: Investigator strategies, sixteen fully-stated up NPCs, and seven full colour maps.

Pros
# Support for Cthulhu Dark Ages# Can be played just using Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition
# Designed for three players (but playable by more)
# Creepy opening scenes
# Open-ended design
# Scope for scenery-chewing NPCs
# Scope for inter-factional skulduggery
# Big climax

Cons
# Support for Cthulhu Dark Ages
# Poorly explained set-up
# Open-ended plot
# Not suitable for the new Keeper
# Possible party split
# Potentially easy access to powerful Mythos tomes

Conclusion
# Unfamiliar setting
# Underwritten set-up
# The Mythos meets B-Movie, blood & guts, hack & slash with a whiff of a rose!

UPDATE 11/10/2019:  Four new poses have been added to the Fantasy Creatures set; a knight; a minotaur; a griffin and a snake woman.


The new sets from SCS Direct are finally available on Amazon . . . only about two years later than expected.  They are only available on Amazon so far. I do not even see them on SCS's own website yet.  

These are nice sets of figures.  In addition to the "Fantasy Creatures" and "Robots" labels, they each have a decal identifying them as "Wicked Duals."  The figures are a bit smaller than SCS's zombie and monster sets. I like all of the Fantasy Creatures except for the pixie.  There was no need for a pixie.  I was hoping for a lizardman in this set, but no, we get a pixie.  The Robots score very high on the weird scale, and I like that.  I just wish they came in more, or better, colors.  

Fantasy Creatures

New poses added in 2019,




















Robots

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles—and so on, as the anniversaries come up. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.
—oOo—
The very first adventure that roleplaying hobby gave us was the dungeon and the purest form of the dungeon is the megadungeon. The megadungeon is like a dungeon, a complex of rooms and corridors beneath the earth populated by traps, puzzles, treasure, and monsters, but on a larger scale. Often a much larger scale—a scale large enough that the dungeon itself becomes the focus of the campaign. In such a megadungeon, the player characters will either visit the dungeon again and again, returning to the surface regularly to rest, resupply, and research, or there may be areas within the dungeon where they can rest or even resupply, so that they rarely return to the surface. Although other fantasy and fantasy-like roleplaying games do do dungeons or dungeons that are not ‘dungeons’—for example, Numenera and Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne—the megadungeon remains very much the province of Dungeons & Dragons and its various editions and iterations. The Old School Renaissance—a period so far contemporaneous with Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—has been the greater source of the megadungeon in the last fifteen years. Notable examples include Barrowmaze and Dwimmermount, both published for use with Labyrinth Lord, both large tomes in themselves, but another megadungeon, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls, offers much more stripped back play.

Written and published by the author of The Dungeon Alphabet: An A-Z Reference for Classic Dungeon Design for use with Labyrinth Lord in 2009, Stonehell Dungeon offers a constrained five level dungeon with some seven hundred locations, complete with a detailed history, numerous factions, and a surprisingly reasonable rationale for its existence. And all that in just one hundred and thirty four pages. Plus that is only half of the dungeon as another five Levels and another six hundred locations are detailed in the second part, Stonehell Dungeon: Into the Heart of Hell. This sounds like an awful lot and an awful lot in relatively few pages. The question is, how does it manage to do what sounds like an all but impossible task?

Stonehell Dungeon does this by using the one-page dungeon format—best seen in the One-Page Contest—designed to fit a complete, compact adventure on a single page which a Labyrinth Lord can read and prepare in a few minutes before running it for her players in a session (or two). Thus the Labyrinth Lord has to pack in the monsters, the treasure, the puzzles, the traps, and the story into as tight a space as possible and it still offer a high degree of playability. Now the design of Stonehell Dungeon does not strictly adhere to the one-page dungeon format, but the fact that it does is not without its consequences, both good and bad,

Since Stonehell Dungeon is a megadungeon, it cannot simply fit one level into the one-page dungeon format, so instead it divides each level into four quadrants, each of which receives not the one-page dungeon treatment, but a double-page spread treatment—twice. The first of these highlights the salient features and nature of the quadrant with an overview, a description of its population, special dungeon notes, important NPCs, and any new monsters, spells, or magic items. This is the main body of the text for the quadrant, for the second double-page spread gives a map of the quadrant, tables for elements such as wandering monsters and random crypt contents, lists its notable features, and then provides a room key for all of the quadrant’s notable locations. This last feature is highly economical with its words, according each or location no more than three sentences each—and rarely that. What is this means that Stonehell Dungeon manages to pack in descriptions—thumbnail descriptions, but descriptions nonetheless—of thirty to forty rooms in just over page! 

Now what the room descriptions do not include are any monster stats. These are are included in a double-page spread given for the level and all four of its quadrants as a whole. This double-page spread shows the four quadrant maps together as a whole so that the Labyrinth Lord can see their connection and this is accompanied by an overview of the level as a whole and a full monster list for the level, including their stats. What this means is that the Referee is not going to be running Stonehell Dungeon from just the double-page spread of the quadrant map and room list, but will still need to refer to the overviews of both the quadrant and the level. That said, the format means that this cross-referencing is kept to a minimum and with a printout of the monster list to hand the Labyrinth Lord could just work from just the double-page spread of the quadrant map and the room list.

What this means is that Stonehell Dungeon can be run with the minimum of fuss, quadrant by quadrant, level by level. Even preparation is relatively light, since the quadrants, for the most part, are fairly self-contained, with little overlap from quadrant to another, though there is some overlap in the deeper levels. This almost compartmentalisation means that it is relatively easy for the Labyrinth Lord excise a quadrant from Stonehell Dungeon and run it elsewhere or on its own. On the downside, it means that the story and the narrative in the dungeon can also become compartmentalised because the connections between individual quadrants are also limited. Now to be fair, there are story and plot elements in Stonehell Dungeon mostly through the hooks which pull the adventurers into the dungeons, but this being a dungeon for the Old School Renaissance, there is less of an emphasis upon plot and more on what the players and their characters bring to the adventure and dungeon.

As to the plot and rationale of Stonehell Dungeon, it is a former prison, a penal solution for a tyrant some three centuries ago who had too many enemies and not enough gaol space. Begun as an experiment, the tyrant fed in more and more prisoners who had to dig and expand its confines in order to make space. The prison was also self-governing, the guards only there to prevent escapes and as ever greater numbers have been forced in, a malign society of rival gangs was formed. When the tyrant and his regime was overthrown, the prison was abandoned, few escaped, and the limited reform or rescue teams sent in, never returned. Those who remained went mad and many descended into cannibalism as something seemed to feed on and exacerbate the madness and later spread Chaos… In the centuries since Stonehell Dungeon was abandoned, it has been a base for bandits and brigands, a destination for adventurers, and more. Today, its location is well-known, lying at the far end of a gorge when the ruins of the prison’s fortifications and above ground facilities now stand. Together, these serve as Level 0 for the dungeon.

Beyond the abandoned and explored and re-explored opening ‘Hell’s Antechamber’ inside Stonehell Dungeon’s entrance, once the adventurers are in, there is the neutral ground of a Kobold Village of dungeon caretakers to be found, a Hobgoblin army preparing for conquest, a Dwarf on an architectural survey expedition to be joined, a former serpentine temple which adds an element of Cosmic Horror, an asylum, Wererat mercenaries and spies, a ghost funeral skiff whose crew are still looking looking to take away the dead—and the not-so-dead, whilst the laboratory of the Plated Mage and a strange alien race push Stonehell Dungeon into weird Science Fantasy territory. Not all of this is all that interesting, in general, barring the Kobold Village, any section involving races like Orcs and Hobgoblins feels like they have to be there in order to counterpoint the odder and more interesting aspects of Stonehell Dungeon where the author has been freer with his imagination. Even then, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls is not as weird as it could be, for there are another five levels to come in Stonehell Dungeon: Into the Heart of Hell, and even by the fifth level of the dungeon, very little of weirdness has been touched upon. Of course, if the Labyrinth Lord decides to end the megadungeon playthrough there, it does end with a confrontation with a very well handled monster.

Physically, Stonehell Dungeon is a surprisingly slim book given what it provides. It is lightly illustrated, primarily with publicly available artwork. The writing and editing are generally decent, though the near adherence to the one-page dungeon format does mean that the content feels cramped in places. Another issue is that in the overview pages, elements are typically discussed before their placement in the room lists for each quadrant, so Labyrinth Lord will need to get used to that format rather than the sequential format of other adventures and campaigns.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls is not necessarily the perfect example of a megadungeon to come out of the Old School Renaissance, but it is undeniably a good one. It offers the means to use the stripped back mechanics beloved of the Old School Renaissance which leave room for the Labyrinth Lord’s and her players’ own rulings and input respectively. As much as it is representative of the Old School Renaissance, it is equally of another aspect of the hobby—that nothing new goes out of print. Stonehell Dungeon was published in 2009 and Print on Demand means that a decade on it is still available.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls manages to achieve control of its content via the one-page dungeon format which prevents it from sprawling unnecessarily, which means that it is easier for the Labyrinth Lord to run the megadungeon quadrant by quadrant. Yet at the same time that format places constraints upon its storytelling possibilities and perhaps plots that all too often fight to escape beyond their quadrants. Overall, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls is an incredible piece of design, economical of format and word count in a way which helps the Labyrinth Lord run the dungeon off the page.

Whitehack is a retroclone, a hack, a rough cut of Dungeons & Dragons which sets out to bring a higher degree of flexibility and design than most other roleplaying games of the Old School Renaissance. It bears some mechanical similarities to The Black Hack, but there are more differences than similarities. The Black Hack focuses on dungeon delving and traditional Dungeons & Dragons-style of play with traditional elements such as the Races and Classes found in Dungeons & Dragons, but with mechanics similar to that of Numenera to support player-focused play. Whitehack can do that, but is designed to do Races, Classes, and magic of the players’ and Referee’s choice combined with a simple mechanic, and as much as this provides player and Referee alike with a huge amount of creative freedom, it also comes with a certain degree of conceptual complexity.

A character in Whitehack looks much like a Dungeons & Dragons character, but not. A character has six characteristics—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, plus a Class and Level, Armour Class, Hit Points, and so on. Value for various factors, including Hit Points, along with Attack Value—representing a character’s martial prowess, Saving Throw—rolled to avoid dangers and hazards, Slots—special abilities, and Groups—origins/links/professions, are provided by a character’s Class. Instead of traditional fantasy Classes like Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Wizard, Whitehack has three, all with just ten Levels—Deft, Strong, and Wise. Each Class has some core abilities. Thus Deft characters can roll for double damage when attacking from a dexterously advantageous position, attune themselves to certain objects or animals to do amazing things with them; Strong characters are good in melee and get better such as being able to climb and fight huge opponents or attack with two weapons, and can even learn attack moves from opponents they kill; and Wise characters can do magic, whether that is prayers, spells, rituals, and so forth.

So far, so simple, and so far, not that interesting, but exactly what the Classes, the Slots, and the Groups represent is where Whitehack begins to get interesting. This is because it is entirely up to each player to decide what they are. So a Deft character might be a swashbuckling duellist, a wandering monk from faraway, an agile thief; a Strong character could be a mighty-thewed barbarian, a gigantic prehistoric hominid named Joe Miller, a loyal knight; and a Wise could be a wizard, a priest, a druid, or even a mad scientist. Slots are both special abilities and the number of times that a character can use a special per day, so it is possible to know more than one special ability, but be limited in the number of uses. The player of course tailors the Slots to the character, a Deft archer might know trick shots or jungle acrobat be accompanied by a loyal panther; a charismatic Strong character might boost morale or instil fear, whilst a loyal Strong character could protect others; and a Wise summoner might call things from the netherworld or a Wise steampunk tinkerer might fiddle with a Universal Engine to get any number of effects. 

Then a character has Groups. Every character starts with two of these, representing his Species—if other human, his vocation, or an affiliation with a guild or tribe or school or whatever. An affiliation might even be a strong personality trait or belief, such as Lawful, Evil, or Hesta will always guide me. Whatever the Group, it is always associated with an attribute and whenever the player has to make a check against an attribute when its associated group comes into play, it is always with a bonus. 

Thurston Smith
Level 1 Deft Hero
Hit Dice 1 Attack Value 10 
Move Value 25 Saving Throw 7 
Armour Class 3 Hit Points 5 

Strength 08 
Dexterity 15 (+1 to Initiative) [Treasure Hunter]
Constitution 13 
Intelligence 17 [The Last University]
Wisdom 07 
Charisma 14

Languages: Draconic, Underearth, Common

Special Abilities
Master of the Whip

Whilst Hit Points and weapon damage in Whitehack is rolled on six-sided dice, the roleplaying game’s mechanic uses a twenty-sided die—or two. For his hero to undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die and attempts to roll equal to or under the appropriate attribute. A roll of twenty is a fumble, but a roll equal to the value of the attribute is a critical success. The Referee can make this task easier or harder by increasing or decreasing the value of the attribute for the purposes of the task. If a character has an appropriate group next to the attribute being rolled against, then the player can make a ‘positive double roll’ and roll two twenty-sided dice with only one needing to be equal to or under the attribute for the character to succeed. (Other roleplaying games would call this ‘rolling with advantage’.) If though,  pairs are rolled on ‘positive double roll’ equal to or under the attribute then the character gains an extra bonus of some kind, but if the pairs are over the attribute, he suffers an extra detrimental effect in addition to his failure.
For example, Thurston Smith is on an archaeological expedition and is exploring a necropolis in search of the tomb of Naranda, Lord of the White Scales, an infamous White Dragon cultist. Searching a catacomb complex he comes across the sarcophagus of another potentially important cultist. The stone coffin is carved as if the occupant was wrapped in the wings of a dragon and engraved in the Draconic tongue. Thurston speaks Draconic, but the engravings are faded and the Draconic an ancient variant. To read what it says, Thurston’s player will need to make an Intelligence check. Which for Thurston will be seventeen. Thurston also has an appropriate Group attached to his Intelligence—The Last University—so his player gets to make a ‘double positive roll’. The Referee states that the condition of the engravings makes it harder to read them and levies a penalty. So now Thurston’s player much make a ‘Double Positive Roll’ against a target of fifteen. He rolls six and six—a positive, but not critical success. The Referee identifies the tomb as belonging to Oshun the Minor, another cultist, but one who was part the schism that killed Naranda, Lord of the White Scales and was said to have gone to the grave with some of his enemy’s secrets.Whitehack uses the same mechanic for attacking in combat, but with an adjustment to how Armour Class is handled. The Armour Class scale in Whitehack is ascending, but ascends from zero, indicating no armour, then two for Cloth, three for Leather, and so on. Shields increase Armour Class by one. (A table provides a means of conversion from traditional ascending and descending Armour Class scales found in other fantasy roleplaying games.) When a character attacks an opponent wearing armour or with an Armour Class value, his player is rolling against both the character’s attribute and the opponent’s Armour Class. If the player rolls equal to or under his character’s attribute, but above the Armour Class value, then the attack is successful, but if the roll is under both the attribute and the Armour Class value, then the attack fails.
For example, Thurston, having opened up the sarcophagus of Oshun the Minor, is confronted with the corpse of the long dead priest, reanimated as an Ice Zombie. Thurston quickly draws his flintlock pistol and fires at the looming desiccated ice figure. Thurston’s attack will go first because he is using a firearm and the player will be rolling against Thurston’s Dexterity. However, the Oshun the Minor is flesh and bone hardened by ice, which gives him an Armour Class of three. Any roll of four to sixteen will mean that Thurston’s shot has hit, but a roll of seventeen or more means a miss, and a roll of three or lower means that he has hit Oshun the Minor, but the Ice Zombie’s frozen skin has stopped the ball from Thurston’s handgun.Contests between characters or NPCs can be handled via the simple comparison of attribute rolls, but for longer contests an Auction mechanic can be used. Each participant rolls a six-sided die and keeping the result a secret, bids the value of the number rolled or less as a qualifier much like Armour Class. For example, if Thurston wanted to escape the cold clutches of Oshun the Minor, his player might roll a four on the six-sided die, and bid a three to escape, meaning that he has to roll under Thurston’s Dexterity of seventeen, but over the bid of three to succeed. If he fails, then the Referee gets to bid for Oshun the Minor to catch him… 

Having given the players the freedom to imagine and design their characters how they like just using the three Classes, Whitehack gives the Wise Class and thus spellcasters the freedom to create almost any magic that they like. The downside is that casting spells, doing prayers, performing rituals, and so on costs the caster Hit Points—and the more complex the spell and its effects, the more Hit Points it costs. Now the Wise character does get these Hit Points back faster than any other Class—though not from his own magic—and he can mitigate the Hit Point loss. This might be through the use of the right equipment or tools, ingredients, place, gestures, and so on.
For example, Darius the Spider Mage wants to sneak past some guards in a torchlit cavern. He decides to cast Move Like an Arachnid and climb up the walls and along the ceiling. The Referee states that this will cost Darius 1d6+2 in Hit Points to cast. Darius’ player says that the Spider Mage will make it appear that he has eight legs as part of the casting and rub crushed spiders into his hands and feet. For the first, the Referee agrees to reduce the cost to 1d6+1 and then to 1d6 for the second. Darius’ player rolls the die and loses three Hit Points, but successfully casts the spell...Essentially, spellcasting in Whitehack is a negotiation between the player and the Referee, the player aiming to cast a spell closest to the desired effect, whilst losing as few Hit Points as possible, whereas the Referee is aiming to have the Wise character cast something plausible taking into account the character’s concept, Level, and Groups. This works whatever type of spell or effect the Wise character is aiming for, including the creation of artefacts, although this costs the caster permanent Hit Points rather than temporary ones. For those who like the traditional spells of Dungeons & Dragons and other retroclones, Whitehack includes a list for the players and Referee as a reference to aid them in a more traditional style of fantasy roleplaying game.

Beyond these core rules, Whitehack provides rules for corruption and then four new Classes. The first two are the Brave and the Fortunate, whilst the Dagonite and the Marionette are given as two examples of Race of Class. All four are slightly more complex Classes, the first two designed to be used as replacements should a player character die during the game, the second two to fit the campaign setting given at the end of the Whitehack. All four though, work as examples for the Referee to design her own. Whitehack also provides the Referee on advice when running the game, covering designing or adapting settings, creating adventures and constructing dungeons, and handling campaigns.

Although a full list of monsters is included in Whitehack, it is very much a list and a list a traditional monsters, and given that they are traditional monsters, they do not really anything in the way of an explanation. Instead, Whitehack focuses on building monsters, including ‘Boss’ monsters which have to be taken down stage by stage. The monsters given as an example include Mountain Orcs—stealthy cannibals who are rumoured to be lycanthropes, Rock Snails—beasts of burden whose shells are used as shelter by the travellers they carry; and Whitecloaks, a lawful religious cult dedicated to fighting and curing the corrupted and the cursed. These monsters, much like the artefacts given in Whitehack such as the Dagonite Needle Gun and the Ghost Box—a device for speaking to the undead spirits trapped within, are part of ‘The White Curse’, the campaign setting included in Whitehack.

‘The White Curse’ is a post-apocalypse fantasy setting in which the blood of an evil Witch King seeped into the ground, causing a terrible cold to spread and many of its inhabitants to suffer from a curse that turns them into the Twisted. As the Witch King works to return to the mortal world, one cult known as the Watchers attempts to stop it whilst the Witch Cult works for its master. The world is one of shattered cities buried under ice and freezing seas forcing the amphibious Dagonites to seek refuge on the land, as the Witch Cult searches the ruins for ancient artefacts and the Watchers attempt to stop them. The set-up suggests that the player character party could be part of either organisation which lends itself to some interesting roleplaying possibilities.

Whitehack comes with a scenario, ‘The Chapterhouse Murders’, set within the enclosed chapterhouse of the Whitecloaks. The player characters will need to conduct their investigations outside the chapterhouse in the gorge city of Ode and then find their way inside to continue. Much of the scenario is built around a mindmap of relationships that the Referee will need to work from, with the investigation inside the chapterhouse combining a dungeon crawl and a murder mystery, but playd out with stealth. Clues learned in ‘The Chapterhouse Murders’ will lead the player characters out of the city of Ode and after a murderous MacGuffin, the significance of which will vary according to which side the player characters are working for. ‘The White Curse’ provides impressive support for Whitehack, solid playable fantasy content with both steampunk-esque and Lovecraftian elements.

Whitehack is available in a variety of formats, but the simplest and handiest is a sixty-four page digest-sized book. All versions are illustrated, but the layout is clean and tidy and whilst it needs an edit here and there, the writing is engaging. One issue is with the organisation which puts all of the play examples together in one place and not with the rules they illustrate. This means that grasping the rules is not as immediately as easy as it should be and that is at odds with the simplicity and intent of Whitehack.

As much as many retroclones are designed to emulate particular iterations of Dungeons & Dragons and in many cases, it is claimed that they can do a variety of different types and styles of fantasy too. Now Whitehack can do the traditional fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons and the support and scenarios for traditional Dungeons & Dragons and other retroclones can be adapted to Whitehack—a matter of the Referee making the adjustment of the mechanics and numbers from the other to Whitehack, which can be done on the fly once she is used to it—what Whitehack offers is the flexibility and freedom to do more. Not just for the Referee, but the players who have the freedom to create the characters they want without the constraints of traditional fantasy. On the downside though, the freedom means a lack of options to choose from and for some players and Referees this can be paralysing. (In which case, Whitehack may not be for such players and Referees and perhaps The Black Hack would be a more suitable choice as it is more traditional in the options and fantasy it offers.)

Whitehack is a retroclone package in two parts. The first the rules, simple and easy, but unconstrained in terms of what each player wants in his character and the Referee wants in the design of her fantasy world. The second is an example setting and scenario combination showcase with enough content to get a game of Whitehack going, yet with room enough for the Referee to expand and develop as is her wont. Overall, Whitehack is a great retroclone for giving player and Referee design freedom alike—and then showcasing how it can be done.

There is no denying the continued and growing popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, with it having appeared on the television series Stranger Things and it no longer being seen as a hobby solely the preserve of typically male, nerdy teenagers and young adults. Yet as acceptable a hobby as roleplaying and in particular, playing Dungeons & Dragons has become, getting into the hobby is still a daunting prospect. Imagine if you will, being faced with making your first character for your first game of Dungeons & Dragons? For nearly all of us, this is not very far from being a challenge, for we all started somewhere and we all had to make that first step—however many years ago it was. What do you play? What choices do you make? As well written as both Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the Player’s Handbook are, both still present the prospective reader and player with a lot of choices, but without really answering that first question after deciding that you want to play, and that is, “What do I want to play?”

Step forward Warriors & Weapons, part of the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ published by Ten Speed Press. It is an introductory guide to Dungeons & Dragons, designed as a primer to many of the types of characters that can be played in the game, plus the arms and armour they will equip themselves with and the various tools they will carry when go adventuring. Notably, it is profusely illustrated, no page consisting entirely of text. The artwork is all drawn from and matches the style of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, so as much as it provides an introduction to characters in the roleplaying game, it provides an introduction to the look of the roleplaying game, so providing continuity between the other books in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ and the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the core rulebooks. This use of art and the digest size of the book means that from the start, Warriors & Weapons is an attractive little package.

As to the content, it can really be divided into three sections—‘Fantasy Races’, ‘Character Classes’, and ‘Equipment’. The first covers nine Races found in Dungeons & Dragons. These are Human, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling, Dragonborn, Kenku, Tabaxi, Tiefling, and Tortle, with each being accorded a double-page spread. Along with an illustration, this opens with a simple set of questions and a suggestion, such as, “Are you fascinated by how the world works?”, “Do you sometimes talk too much?”, and “Do you long to see the world and make new friends along the way?”, which the book answers with, “You might be a Gnome!”. This is accompanied by more information about the Race, some ideas of their typical names, and typical attributes, so Intellect, Industrious, Dexterity, and Tricky for Gnomes.

The six Character Classes in Warriors & Weapons, all of a martial bent, are given a similar treatment. They are Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue, each entry asking questions similar to those of the Races, detailing their archetypes, their equipment and attributes, and so on. Thus the Martial Archetypes of Battle Master, Champion, and Eldritch Knight for the Fighter Class, that they can use all arms and armour, and gain from Second Wind, which gives them greater resolve. Further each Class is accompanied by an exemplar or legendary member of that Class. So there is Wulfgar the Warhammer for the Barbarian and Shandie Freefoot for the Rogue, with descriptions of what they can do and what it would be like to play them. All six are notables from the Forgotten Realms, veteran fans likely to enjoy the inclusion of Minsc the Mighty along with Boo the Hamster. 

The Class section ends with two things. The first is a ‘Class Flowchart’ which asks a few questions and quickly guides the prospective player to the Class that he might like to play. It does seem odd to have this placed after the descriptions of the Classes rather than before and it seems even odder not have a ‘Race Flowchart’ in the previous section. The other is a look at ‘Character Background & Inspiration’, basically introducing some of the Backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook. Lastly, it asks what makes your character special beyond Race and Class, including flaws.

The first two sections have been all about who are you and what do you do. The third and final section, deals with equipment, detailing not just clothes, but arms, armour—the latter with a special warning about the dangers of encountering a Rust Monster, and kits and packs. Packs in particular get some attention, a full page illustration and a description each, all handily presented. If there is a single niggle with the whole of this useful reference section, it is that the Pike is included in the description of polearms rather than the humble spear.

Rounding out Warriors & Weapons is some last words about building a hero, telling the reader that he is on his first steps composing his adventurer’s story. It opens up a little to ask the player to wonder about the other heroes his character will adventure alongside, what and where his adventures take place, and of course, why? It explains a bit more about the play of Dungeons & Dragons, so serving as a light primer before the player gets to the table.  

There are just two issues with Warriors & Weapons. The first is that as an introduction to the types of characters you can play in Dungeons & Dragons, as its title suggests, it only gets half of the job done. It does not cover Clerics, Sorcerers, and Wizards, or indeed any of the other spellcasting character types in Dungeons & Dragons. All that is covered in Wizards & Spells, the companion to Warriors & Weapons. So to learn about those character types—and thus all of the character types in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—the prospective player as yet unsure as  to which to play will need to buy the two books. That said, neither book is expensive. Unfortunately, Wizards & Spells is not available until March of 2020, so the prospective Wizard-playing player wanting to know more will still have to consult the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set or the Player’s Handbook.

The other issue is that Warriors & Weapons includes some non-standard Races. These are the Kenku, the Tabaxi, and the Tortle. None of these three are in the Player’s Handbook and so any prospective looking to play a member of these Races is going to be disappointed. Further, there are no pointers as where the details of these Races can be found. Obviously, the next step from Warriors & Weapons is the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set or the Player’s Handbook, but not for those Races. For a book so obviously intended to be helpful, their inclusion and their lack of pointers is odd to say the least, if not simply just unhelpful.

Physically, Warriors & Weapons is an attractive little hardback. It is bright, it is breezy, and it shows a prospective player what he can play, both in the art and the writing. Further, the art shows lots of adventuring scenes which can only spur the prospective player’s imagination.

Now obviously, Warriors & Weapons is designed to showcase Dungeons & Dragons and introduce the prospective player to what he can roleplay. And this it does well enough, given that another book is needed to cover all of the choices available. It should be noted that given the lack of statistics and other values, Warriors & Weapons would also work as an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons-style retroclones, though in its look, it is brighter and breezier than the style and tone of the typical fantasy roleplaying game from the Old School Renaissance.

As an introduction to some of the character types you can play in Dungeons & Dragons and a little of the types of adventures such characters can have, Warriors & Weapons very nicely works as a book to give as a gift for the prospective or curious player. Especially if he has played any of the Endless Quest solo adventure books published by Wizards of the Coast. Warriors & Weapons though, is also a book to have at the table as a reference guide. Of course the Player’s Handbook does that too, but Warriors & Weapons, by virtue of its size, its brevity, and its lack of gaming stats, is handier and easier to use. So questions like, “How does a Fighter fight?” or “What does a Dragonborn look like?” or “What is scale mail?” or “What is in an Explorer’s Pack?” can all be answered by flipping through the pages of this smaller, much shorter tome.

Warriors & Weapons is not perfect by any means, but it is a bright and easy read, the first part of what should serve as a light introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. One that nicely works as a gift as much as it does a reference work.

k141:

Dragon Familiar

'Taumel' or 'Frenzy'

'Gluckspiel' or 'Game of Chance'

'The Devil as Matchmaker'


Artworks found at the online collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Artworks found at the online collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.