One of the aspects of the Old School Renaissance is that with access to the Open Game License and System Reference Document, roleplayers, Dungeon Masters, Referees, and game designers can not only revisit particular versions of Dungeons & Dragons—whether that is the original Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Dungeons & Dragons, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—but specific editions of those games. So it is with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. Published by Necrotic Gnome—a publisher best known for the Wormskin fanzine and Dolmenwood setting—following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is one such retroclone of a particular edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons. That edition is the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay and its accompanying Expert Set by Dave Cook and Steve Marsh. The core book for which is the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome.

What this means is that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is a Basic Dungeons & Dragons retroclone. It is a Class and Level roleplaying game, the combination of the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set, providing scope for characters to go from First Level to Fourteenth Level. It does ‘Race as Class’, so the Classes are Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, and Thief—all Humans, plus Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling. The Dwarf is a Fighter able to detect underground construction tricks and room traps, with Infravision, and good hearing; the Elf is a Fighter able to cast arcane spells, has Infravision, good sight and hearing, and is immune to Ghoul Paralysis; and the Halfling is a Fighter good at hiding, has good hearing, and is good with missile weapons. The Cleric has the Turn Undead ability, but does not get a spell until he has reached Second Level, whilst the Magic-User gets just the one spell at First Level. The attributes are still on the three to eighteen scale, but the modifier ranges from -3 to +3. The Alignments are Law, Neutral, and Chaos, rather Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Good, Neutral, et cetera. In combat, weapons do a six-sided die’s worth of damage with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy uses THAC0 or ‘To Hit Armour Class 0’. Notably though, the range of Armour Class values starts at 9 and ends at -3, rather than starting at 10 and ending at -10 as in other iterations of Dungeons & Dragons.

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy also includes the option for High-Level play, taking the player characters above the Fourteenth Level maximum of the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set, right up to Thirty-Sixth Level much in the vein of the Mentzer edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and it subsequent expansions. Another inclusion is a list of the Level titles—so Acolyte, Adept, Priest/Priestess, and so on for the Cleric Class and Veteran, Warrior, Sword-Master, and so on, for the Fighter Class—another feature of early versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules for High-Level play and the Level titles are taken from the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set rather than being new additions.

Ixyll
First level Magic-User
Alignment: Law
Armour Class: 10
Hit Points: 3
THAC0: 19

Strength 05 (-1, 1-in-6 Open Doors)
Intelligence 13 (Elvish, Literate)
Wisdom 10 
Dexterity 12 
Constitution 12 
Charisma 08 (-1, Max. Retainers: 3, Loyalty: 6)

Spells: Sleep
Equipment: Backpack, lantern, oil flask (2), tinder box, wine, iron rations, crowbar, daggers (3), 63 GP

At its core, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is Basic Dungeons & Dragons writ large then. Except not—and in a number of ways. To begin with, it provides options that shift it away from the original Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and a step or two closer to modern sensibilities. Most obviously, providing rules for ascending Armour Class as first seen in Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition rather than the descending Armour Class of THAC0, and to be fair, it is an easier, more intuitive option. Another modernism is actually not, that of ability checks, which in Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy has a player rolling equal to or under one of his character’s six abilities for the character to succeed at a challenging task. Rather its inclusion is intended to address an ambiguity, their being included as an option in the Expert Set rules for Basic Dungeons & Dragons, but not in the Basic Dungeons & Dragons rules themselves. Other ambiguities the designer has addressed from the Moldvay edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons includes the Encumbrance rules; how much Experience Points should be awarded to retainers—half of the Experience Points earned by the player characters is due to them; clearly distinguishing between the room traps that characters of all Classes can attempt to find, and the small or treasure traps which the Thief Class specialises in finding and disarming; clearly stating that characters cannot run in combat; changing the Morale rules so that monsters definitely check Morale the first time when one of their number is killed; and balancing the values of the various treasure types. 

In addition, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy expands the scope of Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons. For the most part these are more changes in terminology rather than scope. Thus ‘Adventure’ is no longer used to refer to a single session of an ongoing game; the term ‘Hirelings’ is introduced to cover all non-adventuring retainers; and the term ‘THAC0’ is imported from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition to help explain the combat mechanics. (Its inclusion also helps ground player and Referee in the retroclone.) It also opens up the use of the subdual rules for dragons to apply to other monsters too and applies the rules for handling watercraft to other vehicles.

So what else is in the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome? Besides the seven Classes and method of creating characters, the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome covers wealth and encumbrance; vehicles and mounts; extensive spell lists for both Arcane spellcasters—the Magic-User and the Elf, and Divine spellcasters—the Cleric; adventuring—dungeon and wilderness adventuring, encounters, pursuit and evasion, and combat; hired help—retainers, mercenaries, and specialists; strongholds and domains; a bestiary, from Acolyte, Ape (White), and Bandit to Wyvern, Yellow Mould, and Zombie; advice on Running Adventures for the Referee; and treasure lists including sentient swords. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of information here, but a very great deal of it will be familiar to the target audience for the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. Which means that a member of that audience could grab a copy of this roleplaying game and a fantasy scenario of their choice and run using these rules.

At the sharp end of the game, the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome also covers adventuring in just a few pages, covering marching order and the ‘Caller’ and ‘Mapper’ roles, time, movement, adventuring in dungeons, the wilderness, and on the water, combat, and more. Notably here, the dungeoneering aspect of the game is played out in ten-minute turns, the Referee first rolling for wandering monsters, the party deciding its actions and the Referee describing their outcome, followed by his bookkeeping at the end of the turn. Wilderness Adventuring and Waterborne Adventuring follows a similar pattern, but adding weather and getting lost into the mix. What the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is doing here is highlighting the procedural nature of play within the rules of not just this retroclone, but also Dungeons & Dragons in its earlier incarnations. In fact, the graphical design of Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy draws the reader’s very attention to this by placing each sequence of play in a box at the start of their relevant sections.

The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome comes as a thick digest-sized hardback, but it never feels stodgy or like it is trying to pack too much information into its smaller page size. What is obvious about Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is that as much thought has gone into its physical design as its mechanical design. A great deal has effort is made to fit particular sections of rules onto double page spreads, so how to create a character and an explanation of the six abilities take up a double page spread as do the rules for hazards and challenges, dungeon adventuring, wilderness adventuring, and so on and so on. The designer does this again and again, but some rules need just a page, like those for Alignment, and other content needs more, such as the spell lists and the bestiary obviously. The designer really makes good use of the space in the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome and none of it feels wasted.

The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is liberally illustrated using a lot of black and white pieces with full colour spreads between chapters of the book. Some of it is weird, some of it wonky, some of it wonderful, but a wide range of styles showcasing many of the artists drawing for the Old School Renaissance today. The writing and editing is also good, the former succinct in presenting and explaining the rules. A nice touch is that many of the most useful rules and tables have been reproduced inside the front and back covers of the book.

What is missing from the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is anything in the way of examples. So there is no example of character generation, of play, of combat, and so on. True, its target audience does not need such examples, but it would have been nice to have had them included, not just to see the designer’s mind at work, but perhaps add a degree of verisimilitude from the roleplaying game that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is based upon. Similarly, there is no adventure in the book, or sample locales, but again, the audience for whom Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is intended will doubtless have content of their own to use. Equally as similar is that it would have been nice to see the types of adventure that the designer had intended to use these rules for, but that said, he has published several for use with the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. 

What the version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons that followed the Moldvay version—the Mentzer version from 1983—ultimately got, but the Moldvay version never did, was a compilation. This was the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, which is now available via Print on Demand. That is no longer the case. Thanks to Necrotic Gnome, the Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons now has its own answer to the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia in the form of the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. It is not only a lovely representation of those rules, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is a representation with a polish, an adjustment for inconsistencies, errors, and so on, all to make it more playable. The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is the update that the 1981 Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons deserved.

Things are coming back together, so it’s time for the reminder that the latest Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas gallery open house starts December 7 at 6:00 pm. See you here.

Published by Lost Pages, Genial Jack Vol. I is the first issue of a serialised setting that is one-part the Book of Jonah, one-part Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport, one-part Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships or Gulliver’s Travels, one part Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, but all weird nautical urban fantasy that can be best described as ‘whale-punk’. This is because Genial Jack Vol. I details a levianthine Blue Whale which for centuries has been home to the teeming town of Jackburg built across his thick skin and in his stomachs and deep into his intestines, much of it made up of the ships he has swallowed and those that have sailed into his maw and permanently moored inside of him. Jackburg is home to peoples and islands that the whale—the ‘Genial Jack’ of the title—has swallowed, from the Draugr to the Fomorians, and today it serves as a roaming free port, from which merchants sell the strange and exotic goods they have acquired in distant lands as well as the ambergris constantly formed deep in his gut.

Designed for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—but very easily adapted to the retroclone of your choice—Genial Jack Vol. I focuses very much on the peoples and places of Jackburg. The former includes over thirteen new player character Races. These start with the undead Draugar, drowned corpses from the north who dwell in longships and a reputation for fell curses and trading in people, and Finfolk, sly, shapeshifting merfolk who are known for their illusions and the indentured workers they mark with their bloodsucking maws; and Formorians, giants banished from Faerie by Queen Mab who can cast an evil eye about, but are skilled crafters of magical devices and weapons and armour, to Sirens, who have reputations as malicious seductresses, but are highly charismatic and help in Jackburg’s aerial defence; Undines, water elementals who can turn into water and back again and work in Jackburg powering waterwheels, serving as living air-suits, and moving vessels and cargo; and Urchins, Jackburg’s underclass, beggars—Urchin Beggars?—who will happily eat rubbish, but who are considered to be lucky. The others do include Humans, but also the hive-mind Jellyfolk, the Karkinoi crustacean warriors, tentacular mercantile Octopoids, the sentient and artistic coral Polypoids, the bankers and thieves who make up the Ratfolk, and the often vicious shark-men raiders known as the Selachians, who include an individual casino-owner and moneylender who is called, of course, the Loan Shark. All of these Races have adapted to an amphibious life aboard Genial Jack and inside Jackburg, including being able to see in dim or low lighting, many need to be submerged at least once per day.

Genial Jack Vol. I then examines each of Jackburg’s districts in both Outer Jackburg and Inner Jackburg, the former being on the exterior of Genial Jack, the latter inside him. Each is given a full page which includes a short description and a handful of encounters and locations. So along the great whale’s flanks can be found Barnaclebank, the series of barnacles which have been hollowed out and linked via tunnels of reinforced glass and iron, then carved and reshaped, many of them into gun emplacements, harpoon launchers, and torpedo bays manned by the Whaleguard, Jackburg’s guard and security forces—unsurprisingly, Genial Jack has a decent navy to protect both himself and Jackburg. The encounters include an emergency as a porthole has cracked and is letting in water with the player characters being the nearest ones who can fix it before the Whaleguard can get there and the discovery of an enormous crimson pearl brought ashore by Jackburg’s fisherfolk, which might be anything from a mermaid lich’s phylactery to a resurrection stone. The locations given thumbnail descriptions are the Barnaclebank Fish Market which operates on the extendable docks on Genial Jack’s starboard flank, and the Sea Star Saloon, a tavern inside a single, huge barnacle-shell which is run by a man with the lower body of a starfish and which caters to Whaleguard officers and fishermen alike.

At the other end is The Gutgardens at the bottom of the whale’s main stomach. Here fish and krill is received from Genial Jack’s maw via canals and tubes and cultivated into gut bacteria and symbiotic algae which soothes his innards. They are worked by Gutgardeners in signature green and black uniforms with gas masks and heavy-duty work boots and gloves. The encounters include coming across a pair of Bloodskulls gang members about to dunk a debtor in Acid Lake; an invasion of Feral Fungoids driven into frenzy after feeding on Genial Jack’s blood; and a poisonous miasma that will leave all who breathe it in with a lung infection. The locations include an abattoir where a Jellyfolk mentalist humanely stuns livestock before their slaughter; the aforementioned Acid Lake, where enclosed and perfumed domes provide popular picnic spots for those from Inner Town; and the Digestive Reserves, areas kept entirely free of buildings and people to aid in Genial Jack’s digestion.

Some twenty or so districts are described in this fashion, along with a centre spread illustration/map of Genial Jack and Jackburg, as well as a list of city slang. So far, so good, but so far this is forty pages into Genial Jack Vol. I and the reader is left wondering how all of this works, who is in charge, and so on. At this point, Genial Jack Vol. I does cover the authorities of Jackburg, including The Captains’ Conclave held at Mysterium Tremendum, a massive ship and alehouse, where every captain and depending on the size of their constituent populations they represent, ship’s mates too, express their opinions and suggest where the Whale journeys next. Such are directions are imparted by the Navigators, the divine intercessors between the peoples of Jackburg and the ‘Godwhale’ that is Genial Jack, who are descended from those first shipwrecked inside him. Lastly, the Whaleguard is Jackburg’s navy and police force. Rounding out Genial Jack Vol. I are some details of Jackburg’s laws and criminal organisations as well as a list of some twenty interesting Jackburgers, inhabitants of Jackburg.

Physically, Genial Jack Vol. I  is more of a magazine rather than a book. Down in black and white throughout, this first issue is richly illustrated with some fantastic cross sections of Jackburg’s twenty districts. Use of the art does veer into the repetitious, but it has to be said it is good art. On the downside, the twelve new Races are only given portrait illustrations rather than full body shots, so players and Referee alike will need to use a little imagination there. The cover though is absolutely fantastically fantastic, a piece of artwork which just grabs the reader. Elsewhere, the writing is decent, as is the editing.

Genial Jack Vol. I  still feels as if it is missing one or two things. Obviously a scenario, but then it has almost forty encounters across the various districts it describes, but more problematically there is no discussion of what Classes are suitable or found in Jackburg and there are no new Classes. Yet, the one thing that is really missing is a discussion of the technology found on and in the Godwhale. Gunpowder definitely, but also an overhead tram which runs from Genial Jack’s Maw down its oesophagus, and working of iron and glass into tunnels, all of which suggests advanced technology of a kind. Exactly what though, is another matter. Hopefully, it will be covered in a later issue.

Although written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, the rules content in Genial Jack Vol. I is very light being confined to the various abilities possessed by each Race. This means that it is very easy to adapt to the retroclone of your choice and it is very much a case of Genial Jack Vol. I being imaginative enough to transcend any limitations a Referee or player should have with regards to their roleplaying game of choice. Not only could this be adapted to the retroclone of your choice, it could be adapted to the setting of your choice, whether that is Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport: City of Adventure or the world of 50 Fathoms for use with Savage Worlds or the Referee’s own campaign world.

Although just the first issue, Genial Jack Vol. I is a satisfying appetiser for what promises to be an imaginatively weird and wonderful setting. It can absolutely be described as unique, the first ‘whalepunk’ setting. Genial Jack Vol. II is eagerly awaited.

Not music videos tonight but the trailers for The CW's Crisis on Infinite Earths five hour crossover that begins on Sunday.



It is no lie or exaggeration that Crisis. the comic. had a HUGE impact on me and my games.  We did our own Crisis of Infinite Oerths back in 1986-87 to bring all our various worlds into alignment.  I am doing something like it again with my Come Endless Darkness campaigns for 5e.

But this is a big one.

So what do we have?

Lots.








Even the fan-made videos look great!







I have been waiting for this since I was 16.

For Paul Mears, who has had to put up with me for 40 years as of tomorrow and hasn’t buried me in an unmarked grave…yet.

More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is one of four short scenarios for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay released by Lamentations of the Flame Princess at Gen Con 2019, the others being Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas, Menagerie of Exiles, and Zak Has Nothing To Do With This Book. Written by Kelvin Green, the author of Forgive Us and Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, it is like several other scenarios from the publisher, set in the early modern period of the opening decades of the seventeenth century. It is also a sequel of sorts to the author’s scenario for adult Referees and players, the aforementioned Fish Fuckers.

From the start, including the title and its vibrant cover, it is obvious that More Than Meets The Eye is a weird, fantasy homage to a certain franchise of films involving giant robots capable of transforming into everyday objects. Not only is its location called St. Michael’s Bay, but the antagonists of the bay are transforming aliens, though not robots. Instead they are squidy, squidgy, tentacled aliens—shoggoths?—capable of transforming into everyday objects. This is depicted on the front cover and in a really good illustration inside the book. This transformation theme runs throughout the scenario, whether it is objects transforming into aliens (shoggoths), or the player characters into another race or Class, or simply into goop. There is a certain sexual element to the scenario, but it is not quite as prurient as that of Fish Fuckers.

Like the aforementioned scenario, More Than Meets The Eye is set in the West Country, but Cornwall rather than Devon, begging the question, “What exactly, does the author have against the people of the West Country?”. A light has been in the sky over the coastal village of St. Michael’s Bay or there has been violence in the coastal village of St. Michael’s Bay following a light has been in the sky or nothing has been heard from the leading men of the village, Ernest and Henry Hastings, and their business associates want to ensure that they are all right. These are the reasons to bring the player characters to the village of St. Michael’s Bay, which absolutely has to be the best use of the director’s name under any circumstances and well, it is set in Cornwall, home to Saint Michael's Mount (if there was a French version, there has to be a joke in there about Le Mont-Saint-Jean-Michel-Jarre).

What is going is this. St. Michael’s Bay has been invaded—twice. First by a group of shape-changing aliens in the past, fleeing a civil war amongst their kind. This group has recently been awoken after millennia of hibernation and in the process, the second group, come to Earth to capture the first. Which leads to a confrontation and a stand-off, one which the player characters are likely to break. Depending upon the outcome, there is a chance that the player characters might end up with a—unsurprisingly, given that this scenario is for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay—weird spaceship, which is not actually as bad as it might seem. After all, there are any number of scenarios published for the roleplaying game and other Old School Renaissance roleplaying games which are set in weird locations, for example, Barbarians of the Orange Boiling Sea, which could be reached by a spaceship.

Physically, More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is well presented, with some really quite entertaining artwork. The book could be better edited though.

More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles lives up to its title. It is short, probably providing no more than a session or two of play—though if the player characters get hold of the spaceship, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. It also has a lot of tentacles and no, you do not want to get close and personal with any of them! More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is also bonkers, but it is the best version of Michael Bay throughout all of time and space.

"Alongside artists such as Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs and Rudolf Hausner, he is one of the representatives of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism."

Artwork and quote found at Dorotheum.

I have updated my Witch Links Page.   Every so often I search the blog archives and find links to articles, posts or what have you on what others are saying or doing with witches.  Yeah, I am a tad obsessed, but anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.


So here are some of the ones I found that I thought were fun or interesting from the last six or so months.

If you visit, let them know I sent ya!
If you have a link you would like to share, post it in the comments below.

Boccob's Blessed Blog
20 Pathfinder Witch Quest Ideas
https://boccobsblog.com/2019/05/17/20-pathfinder-witch-quest-ideas/

Daemons & Deathrays
Eastern Gothic – Creatures of Slavic Folklore (Part 1)
https://daemonsanddeathrays.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/eastern-gothic-creatures-of-slavic-folklore/

Eastern Gothic – Creatures of Slavic Folklore (Part 2)
https://daemonsanddeathrays.wordpress.com/2019/11/29/eastern-gothic-part-2/

Greyhawk Stories
Iggwilv: Mother of Witches
https://greyhawkstories.com/tales-from-the-flanaess/iggwilv-mother-of-witches/

Greyhawkery
Witch Queen Iggwilv Discussion Tonight
http://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2019/09/witch-queen-iggwilv-discussion-tonight.html

Hall of the Mountain King
Project - Blackmoor Land of a Thousand Witches - the Sisterhood
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/05/project-blackmoor-land-of-thousand_16.html

Project - Blackmoor Land of a Thousand Witches - NPC Tuure
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/05/project-blackmoor-land-of-thousand_17.html

Project - Blackmoor Land of a Thousand Witches - The Moon Hall
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/05/project-blackmoor-land-of-thousand_22.html

NPC - Linnea Schnai Witch
http://jasonzavoda-hallofthemountainking.blogspot.com/2019/12/npc-linnea-schnai-witch.html

Hero Press
Which Witch Are You?
http://heropresstwo.blogspot.com/2019/10/which-witch-are-you.html

I Don't Remember That Move
a peeper deeper, Ready to Harvest the Witch's Garden
http://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-peeper-deeper.html

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque
Conjure Wife
http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2019/10/conjure-wife.html

Satanic Temple, Witch Board Museum, Count Orlok, Lighthouse, Parasite
https://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2019/12/satanic-temple-witch-board-museum-count.html

Writeups.org
All of these are for DC Heroes Role-Playing Game

Tara Maclay (!) but sadly no Willow
https://www.writeups.org/tara-maclay-amber-benson-buffy-vampire-slayer/

Evil-Lyn (Masters of the Universe cartoons) 
https://www.writeups.org/evil-lyn-masters-universe-cartoon/

Tonight is Krampusnacht or Krampus Night.

So it would be a great time to grab a copy of my Krampus PDFs.

You can get it for 5th Edition or Basic/OSR games.

• Krampus, The Christmas Demon for 5th Era Games
• Krampus, The Christmas Demon for Basic Era Games

They are Pay What You Want, so have fun!

Because let's be honest.  Nothing say's Holiday Cheer quite like a demon put kids in a sack and whipping them.

I already feel more festive! Where's my Egg Nog?

Exhibit / December 5, 2019

Object Name: Heavy Metal LP Cover Art
Maker and Year: Garry Sharpe-Young, 1983-1987
Object Type: Artwork
Description: (Richard McKenna)

Though active for only a brief period of time, artist Garry Sharpe-Young created a series of LP covers that provide a thrilling miniature survey of the mental landscapes of the British heavy metal music scene of the 1980s. The covers—all produced between 1983 and 1987—capture the lurid euphoria of a particular period of metal’s history when, revitalized by the energy of punk, the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal—known to metallers by the sacred and unpronounceable acronym “NWOBHM”—brought an injection of creativity and excitement to a genre many considered moribund, suffocated under the flaccid weight of its own juvenile clichés. Assisted by a DIY approach that was also borrowed from punk, the NWOBHM arrived in the late ’70s with its own thrilling grab-bag of juvenile clichés, or in the worst case took a hungry new approach to those that already existed.

The motifs in Sharpe-Young’s covers will be familiar ones to anyone versed in metal’s preferred leitmotifs—post-apocalyptic wastelands, science fiction, sword and sorcery slop, the occult, war and battlefields, technology and death—but just as the NWOBHM headbangers brought a new prole ferocity and rawness to their music, Sharpe-Young approached his subject matter with a fresh and exciting garishness and spontaneity that clearly displayed the influence of comics and fantasy art (Frank Frazetta, notably), as well as of the artwork flooding out of the nascent video game industry. And what the illustrations might have lacked in slick professionalism they more than made up for with the brute force of their hugely enjoyable silliness.

Despite the relatively slight size of his visual oeuvre (he was apparently inspired by the sight of one of the many particularly awful album covers scattered throughout British fortnightly metal bible Kerrang), it possesses a distinctive aesthetic that, uniquely, doesn’t really resemble anyone else, and its combination of naiveté, technical flair, and all-out punkish chutzpah gives it a vividness and freshness that raises it above most of its peers. And if we can judge by these twelve covers, it seems fair to note that—by the admittedly low standards of the metal scene of the time—Sharpe-Young’s artwork is surprisingly un-sexist, as the intimidating huntress on the cover of Chinawite’s Run for Cover testifies. Something about his creations hints that the late Sharpe-Young was more self-aware than many of his peers in the ’80s, and in fact he went on to became a prominent journalist of the international metal scene.

Painting No. 21 (side A), 1970-73

Painting No. 21 (side B), 1970-73

Painting No. 21 (side B), 1970-73

Grabado #18, 1973

Gears, 1960
 Title Unknown, 1979
 Flintskallig, 1994
 Joint Engineering
 Title Unknown, 1979 Painting 1923, 1960

 Title Unknown, 1961
 On the battle front, nothing new, 1990-91
 Kroppsväcktaren, 1984
 Kapitoleum

Snovit

Sketch for 34 o'clock

Sketch for painting no 26
 Mussepiggpartiet
 Untitled sketch
 Title Unknown, 1991
 Etching No. 14, 1966

Sketch for painting 34

Sexual Motifs 3

Sexual Motifs 2
 Sexual Motifs 1

Sexual Motifs 4" See more at Rahmberg's website.

Artwork found at Bukowskis.

I have not done one of these in a while, and this one seems like a no-brainer. 

The Basic/BX/BECMI Witches

Maybe more so than AD&D, the witch, in one form or the other, has been a part of the Basic D&D game from the early days. 

Holmes Basic
The "Holmes Witch" has been talked about in old-school blogs for years, mine included.  The so-called Holmes witch never materialized, but it kept us waiting for years and kept bloggers entertained for even longer.

GAZ3: Principalities of Glantri
This is, without a doubt, my favorite of all the Gazetteers and one of my all-time favorite Basic-era books.  I reviewed this book in depth a while back and one of the most overt witches in my Basic book collection.
The Witches of Glantri are some of the most detailed of the Basic-era witches.  It's no lie, that red-head on the cover of the Glantri book was one of the inspirations for where I took my own witch character, even if the book came out a year after I rolled up the character (July 1986 for the character and June of 87 for the Glantri book if I remember right.  OR at least that was when I got it).

One thing I don't care for so much with this class is the charisma reduction, but it seems to come up a lot.

I detailed at least one witch, Skylla, using this witch class and it worked out well.  Also, years and years ago, I redid the Glantri witch to make it something closer to my Complete Netbook of Witches for AD&D 2nd ed.

In the AD&D 2nd Ed version of this book, Glantri: Kingdom of Magic, the witch is completely replaced by the Wokani.

GAZ7: Northern Reaches
This Gazetteer covers the lands Ostland, Vestland, and the Soderfjord Jarldoms.  I REALLY wanted to use this back in the 80s with the G-Series.
This book features the Wise Woman (Witches).  This class is considered an NPC Class, but we all know what that means right?  They get a nice balance of both Magic-user and Cleric spells (up to the 6th level), along with the ability to use magical runes.  I kinda wish I had done more with runes in my own Winter Witch book.
The treat I found here was Carrah the Witch Queen of Hel.   Given the focus on Basic/Expert rules, I would likely have made her 14th level.  Or more likely 13th. But there is some good backstory on her here. While the temptation would be to make her a Winter Witch, I think given her unliving status and her ties to Hel she might be more of a Mara Witch.  Maybe a Winter Witch who had been in a Mara coven.

D&D Master Rules Boxed Set
The D&D Master Rules, also the one I know the least about, has rules for non-human spell casters.  Shamans, who can use cleric and druid spells, and the Wicca who can use Magic-user spells.  The list of spells given to Wicca certainly has a witch feel to them. They are really only missing a cure spell or two.

Spells Usable by Wiccas
First Level Magic-User Spells
Detect Magic (B39)
Light (B40)
Protection from Evil (B40)
Read Languages (B40)
Read Magic (B40)
Sleep (B40)

Second Level Magic-User Spells
Continual Light* (B41, XI1)
Detect Evil (B41)
Detect Invisible (B41)
Invisibility (B41)
Levitate (B42)
Web (B42)

Third Level Magic-User Spells
Clairvoyance (XI1)
Dispel Magic (XI1)
Fire Ball (XI1)
Fly (XI2)
Lightning Bolt (Xl2)
Water Breathing (XI2)

Fourth Level Magic-User Spells
Charm Monster (X13)
Growth of Plants* (XI3)
Ice Storm/Wall (X13)
Massmorph(X13)
Remove Curse* (X14)
Wall of Fire (XI4)

Fifth Level Magic-User Spells
Animate Dead (XI4)
Cloudkill(X14)
Dissolve* (C20)
Hold Monster* (XI5)
Pass-Wall (XI5)
Wall of Stone (X15)

Sixth Level Magic-User Spells
Death Spell (XI6)
Move Earth (C21)
Projected Image (X16)
Reincarnation (C21)
Stone to Flesh* (XI6)
Wall of Iron (C21)
* reversible spell

The shaman and wicca are used throughout the Basic line in future books, though the name would later be changed to Wokan or Wokani.

GAZ10: Orcs of Thar
This Gazetteer covers playing orcs, goblinoids, gnolls and other humanoid creatures.  It also has a guide for using the book with AD&D. Goblinoid wicca are featured here but they use the rules already outlined in the Master's book.

PC1 Tall Tales of the Wee Folk
Several non-human creatures are given options for Wicca levels. There are also plenty of new spells for Fairy spell-casters.  Many have since gone on in other products to have even stronger witch associations.  I reviewed this one in-depth yesterday.

PC2 Top Ballista
This also covers several spellcaster non-humans and new races.  In particular, we get gnomes and harpy wicca.  Gnomes advance to level 12 as wicca which is not too bad really.

PC3 The Sea People
Sea Wicca are also presented in this book but by this time we know what to expect.

D&D Rules Cyclopedia
By this point, the Wicca has been renamed to the Wokan, or the plural Wokani.  The spells usable are largely the same. That is to say, no obvious differences jumped out at me.  It also includes a fairly comprehensive list of monsters and what level they can advance to.  Interestingly enough Hags do not cast as Wokani, but rather they cast as clerics.

So. Wicca, Wise Women, and Wokani.  All three share a certain level of similarity and have, over the editions, been used in place of the other.  A good example takes all the way back to the dawn of D&D, Dave Arneson's Blackmoor.  Not the original Blackmoor, but the versions we got from 3rd and 4th edition.  For the 4th edition rules I talked a bit about the Wokani and their relationship to both witches and druids.  That version is no longer available, but the 3rd Edition version is.

Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Core Campaign Book
This is not a Basic-era book. This is a 3rd Edition book, or more to the point, a d20 book.  I bring it up only because we get the Wokani here again.  They read more like primitive arcane spellcasters with a closer tie to the natural world.  That would work fine with most of the products above, to be honest.  These casters use wisdom as their prime and spellcasting ability.  The Blackmoor connection intensifies with it sharing a few gods with the Basic Gazetteers. In particular Hel (Gaz7) and Hella (Blackmoor).  There are more, but that is the one that interests me the most.
The Wokani here seems to move further away from the Glantri Witch, but there are still plenty of commonalities.

Honorable Mentions
I could let things go without a mention of the witches Karelena, Solorena & Trilena from Rahasia. Though these seem to be more of the "witches as weird female magic-users" rather than as witches as I usually mean.

Also, the witch class from Dragon Magazine #20 should get a mention as well.

There is a lot of material here, but not say as much as you could find for the wizard or cleric.  The witch remains one of the great almost-classes of D&D.  Given the dates of all of these works including Dragon Magazine #114, it seems I was tapping into something needed back in 86.   Or, more to the point, we were all exposed to the same influences in culture and this is another fine example of parallel development.

Exhibit / December 4, 2019

Object Name: Ronco advertisements
Maker and Year: Ronco Teleproducts, Inc./Ronco, Inc., 1970s-1984
Object Type: Television advertisements
Video Source: starbond6/YouTube
Description: (Michael Grasso)

During broadcast television’s heyday in the 1970s, the American airwaves presented a series of advertising strata over the course of the broadcast day. The mornings and early afternoons would see household and kitchen products meant to appeal to housewives; toys and snacks and sugary breakfast cereals appeared once the kids got home from school; cars and medicines and other products with broad appeal would show up during prime time. As for late nights and overnights, no one haunted the cheap television commercial breaks quite like Ronco. For two decades—from 1964 to 1984—the company, founded by second-generation gadget salesman Ron Popeil, zapped countless catch phrases into the brains of the American TV-viewing audience. Presenting its array of multi-purpose household gadgets in a breathless, urgent style to fit into a half-minute or full-minute commercial slot, Ronco set the standard for the late-night direct mail sales pitch.

This type of TV ad came directly from Ron Popeil’s experience as an in-person hawker of the kitchen vegetable slicers that his father Sam and uncle Raymond had invented. Ron sold the slicers everywhere in his twenties: from the counter at Woolworths locations in Chicago to county and state fairs throughout the Midwest. By the early ’60s, Ron saw the potential of doing demonstrations on television, and bought cheap airtime on regional stations in Tampa, Florida and the Midwest in 1964, branding his father’s and uncle’s choppers as the now-legendary Veg-O-Matic, giving pop culture the first of many Ronco catchphrases: “It slices! It dices!” The Veg-O-Matic was only the beginning. By the early 1970s, Ronco Teleproducts had dozens of products on offer, none of which had a price point higher than $19.99.

The video above is an internal product reel featuring the kinds of products that Ronco presented from its 1970s heyday right up until the company’s first bankruptcy and dissolution in 1984. Many of these ads are Christmas-themed, as the modest Ronco price points made their products “great Christmas gifts.” The “Ronco Gift Center” (with its “As seen on TV” legend) featured in the first ad demonstrates that while Ronco made a good chunk of its sales through direct mail thanks to its TV ads, the company also used brick-and-mortar discount outlets to replicate the “impulse buy” mood that its TV ads so expertly cultivated. The consumer electronics revolution in the mid-to-late 1970s allowed Ronco to supplement its purely mechanical gadgets (such as the Ronco inside-the-eggshell Egg Scrambler and the “amazing no-spill” all-temperature Ronco AutoCup) with more and more electronic items. The gradual turn against public smoking in America in the ’70s led to the design and sale of Ronco’s various air purifiers like the Ronco Smokeless Ashtray, and no Ronco electronic toy is better known than “Mr. Microphone,” a low-power radio transmitter in a hand-held microphone that allowed the user to broadcast their voice out of a nearby FM radio. America’s love of home entertainment equipment in the late ’70s also allowed Ronco to capitalize by carving out a niche of gadgets for your gadgets, like the Ronco Battery Tester and the Ronco Record Vacuum.

The second half of this commercial reel features Ronco’s various music compilations on LP records; the array of artists and songs on offer (a mix of disco and funk hits, easy-listening hits from long-haired sensitive songwriters, and occasional hard rockers) show that Ronco’s music division, like its gadgets, peaked in the late 1970s. Like its rival K-tel, Ronco bought the rights to recent middling hit singles and put them all on one themed LP, making sure the consumer knew these were no sound-alikes (“Original hits by the original artists!”).

With the rise of cable television in the 1980s, Ronco’s approach of buying cheap late-night commercial time on over-the-air stations became diluted. The decision to expand into electronics also had an effect, as Ronco gadgets like the CleanAire air purifier didn’t match up to similar products on offer from big electronics makers. As mentioned above, the company filed for bankruptcy in 1984. But Ron Popeil himself and countless imitators would find new homes on the late-night airwaves during the rise of the full-length half-hour infomercial in the early 1990s, as well as on dedicated home shopping cable networks.

This week I want to go back and revisit another favorite of mine from the Basic D&D line, but this isn't an oldie for me, but one I picked up just a few years ago.  I am reviewing the PDF and Print version.  There is no print on demand, so my copy was one I scored in a game auction a while back.

PC1 Creature Crucible: Tall Tales of the Wee Folk

The PC Creature Crucible series came at the end of the Gazeteer line for Basic D&D.  AD&D 2nd ed was my game of choice then, but reviewing this now I think I missed out on something fun.  The author of this book, John Nephew, who would later go on to found Atlas Games.  While reading this I was looking for any clues to what would be Ars Magica, but I think I was just projecting.

The book is 96 pages with color covers and black, white and green interior colors.  The PDF is 102 pages (for maps and covers).  It is divided into a 64-page DM's section and a 32-page Adventures section.  This book is something I would have loved back then, and really enjoy now.
The book covers playing several woodlands or faerie races.  The new race-classes you can play are Brownie, Centaur, Dryad, Faun, Hsiao, Leprechaun, Pixie, Pooka, Sidhe,  Sprite,  Treant, Wood Imp, and Woodrake.   One of the features of Basic-era D&D is Race-as-Class, so a Sprite and Halfling can feel like different things with similar levels of progression.

As per Basic D&D each creature gets it's own advancement table and ability minimums and maximums. All, save the Sidhe, have level limits. All of these creatures have a 0 level and in some cases, negative levels, they need to meet the XP requirements for. It all works rather well for Basic D&D really.  We know it can work since we used to do the same thing in Holmes D&D, only not with this much guidance.  It would not be difficult with these guidlines to adapt this to any other version of D&D in fact.   You can look to the 4th Edition Player's Option: Heroes of the Feywild as an example.  Like PC1 Creature Crucible, you can play a dryad, satyr, or pixie.  They even have a similar spell-casting class (more on that later).

The book has a solid Lands of Faerie or even a Feywild feel to it.  A nice green character sheet (which is cool and all, but prints and copies poorly) only adds to that feeling.  The conceit of  the book is to present the information as if given to us from the mouths of four different woodland folk of renown; Olyrrhoe, a centaur prophetess (years before a centaur would teach divination at Hogwarts) tells us about centaurs, wood imps, ,  Lotis, the dryad, speaks for dryads and hamadryads as well as fauns, hsiao, and treants, Robin Goodfellow (yes, THAT Robin) for pixies, sprites and others, and finally Oberon (also THAT Oberon) for Pooka, Sidhe and wood drakes.



This book also deals with three different kinds of spell casters.  Shamans (like druids or clerics, but no turn undead ability), wicca (which you know has my attention! magic-users) and fairy spell casters.  There are some new spells here that very much feel like woodland/wicca/witchy/druid spells.

We get some new equipment, some woodland realms, some organizations and of course our NPCs and a few more besides. Though no Titania, which is odd given the obvious (and necessary) borrowing from Mid-Summer's Night Dream.

That gives us the first 64 pages.
The adventure book makes up the next 32 pages.  We also get an AD&D 2nd Edition conversion guide.  Using these guidelines would help in converting to other versions of D&D, in particular, 5e.

The adventures are short and all share a woodland theme.  They can all be run in a few sessions, usually one per session.

There is also a fun woodlands/faerie themed character sheet.


This is one of those products that I never gave enough attention too back when it came out, but I really wish I had.

Lindsay Oxford / December 3, 2019

In the early 1970s, scores of liberated, fertile women were eager to join the sexual revolution. Along with the diaphragm and IUD, the recently available birth control pill gave women the autonomy to decide when and if they would have children. With so many options and the pill so new, where could a woman turn to get reliable advice and information about contraception? A gynecologist? A trusted female relative? How about an “educational” two-LP set produced by a fly-by-night operation whose only other output may have been a twelve cassette informational program for dental students?

Enter You Don’t Have to Get Pregnant, produced by In Sight & Sound. Or maybe it’s Plan Your Family by Health Information Systems, Inc. Who’s to say? The record’s spartan label calls the set Plan Your Family, while the cover and accompanying booklet—both showing a couple embracing as they walk along the beach—include both proclamations. For what it’s worth, the Library of Congress (along with the University of North Texas, the only other institution with the set still cataloged) has chosen to catalog it as Plan Your Family, the single publication linked to In Sight & Sound. WorldCAT, a searchable network of libraries worldwide, does show other listings for Health Information Systems, Inc.: the set of instructional dental cassettes mentioned above and produced at roughly the same time as Plan Your Family (I’ll use this title going forward).

Whatever the set’s provenance, the creators of the LP were shockingly ill-equipped to advise women on options for their reproductive needs. Paternalism, racism, and outright misinformation pervade Plan Your Family, and it’s prime for aural rubbernecking. With availability of birth control only truly becoming legal nationwide via the Supreme Court’s Eisenstadt v. Baird ruling in 1972—following the more well-known Griswold v. Connecticut, which ensured access to birth control but did not supersede restrictive state laws in about half the country—the sudden need for birth control education may have been a call In Sight & Sound felt moved to answer. Their apparent decision to make Plan Your Family without consulting an OBGYN, however, is another issue entirely.

“Not Trusting to Luck. Not Depending on Hope”

Plan Your Family may have rolled its listeners’ understanding of the female reproductive system back at least two decades. With no introduction other than a disembodied, paternalistic voice imploring us to listen as he addresses us “as a doctor would,” our unnamed narrator begins his four-sided slog. We’re asked to consult the first image in the record set’s accompanying booklet, showing a waiting room full of women—and men—seeking birth control. Our narrator relays his reasons to delay childbirth in a tangle of unattributed quotes. Some cite exhaustion, some cite expense. And one “frank single woman” tells us she “expect[s] to get married,” but doesn’t know when. Birth control is for “the meantime.”

Whatever trust and goodwill Plan Your Family gained in the waiting room is lost as we’re asked to move on to the next illustration. Here, we’re told, is someone who should employ birth control posthaste. A young woman, more olive-complected than most of the waiting room we just left, sits with downcast eyes. We’re told she has five other children, lives in a two-room apartment, and is pregnant. A pause. “Again.” Our narrator-cum-eugenicist doesn’t just hint that she might consider birth control, he expresses disdain that she hasn’t used it before.

“How Does the IUD work? We Don’t Really Know”

It’s just past the waiting room that Plan Your Family really tips its hand, letting us know it’s engaging in gynecological spitballing. Condensed to its basic information, Plan Your Family would run the side of one record. Condensed to accurate family planning advice, it would run even less. From the history of the IUD to the mechanics of the pill and to the very basics of ovulation, Plan Your Family is the equivalent of a book report written the night before, and it’s a wonder it was ever mass-produced.

Like all of the methods discussed, we’re introduced to the IUD—the “intra-utereen device”—on side one, and we revisit it with nearly identical wording later on. It’s this repetition that twice gives us the gem “”Exactly how does the IUD work? Doctors still aren’t sure.” In fact, the modern IUD had been in use for at least 20 years in 1972, and the idea of placing a foreign object into the uterus to prevent pregnancy dates back even farther.

“You Can Make Love Whenever You Want”

The birth control pill is given one full side of Plan Your Family, but our narrator’s understanding of how the pill works is more than a little shaky. In the In Sight & Sound universe, the pill “prevents the production of eggs,” a phrase that seems to imply that women lay eggs like chickens. Women are born with all the eggs they will have in a lifetime, and what the birth control pill does is suppress ovulation—that is, keeps an egg from becoming available to be fertilized. The egg itself was “produced” at birth.

The rhythm, or calendar, method also gets the In Sight & Sound treatment. It’s described here as not only faulty (it is less reliable) but allowing conception-free sex only half the month. Unless our narrator is including the messy but not disqualifying business of menses in his tallies, in reality that number is only about five days to a week of each month. Even less if a woman is tracking her basal temperature—which our narrator mentions as a vital component of the rhythm method.

But what about men? Our listeners, presumably all female, are told “You are in control over your pregnancy. Not the man.” And in the United States in 1972, women did have an unprecedented level of autonomy in their family planning decisions. But In Sight & Sound acknowledges that “a man can do everything that needs to be done to keep a woman from becoming pregnant.” For example, withdrawal, which “isn’t much better than trusting to luck.” Condoms are somewhat creepily referred to as “good to use at special times.” Finally, sterilization, a “confusing and sometimes frightening word,” prevents a man from releasing sperm at all.

The Plan Your Family team still needed to do some padding to fill all four sides, so they combat schoolyard contraceptive myths: wrapping your penis in plastic wrap is not an adequate substitute for a condom. Douching will not expel sperm. And sex standing up—or in any position, for that matter—will not prevent pregnancy.

“The Answer is Probably”

Who exactly was Plan Your Family meant for? My own copy, rescued from a community college dumpster in 2008, has the stamp of the college’s nursing program, assuredly a better resource to accurately instruct students about a woman’s family planning choices. Then again, without a way to sample content beforehand, it would have been impossible to know how condescending, ill-informed, and outright lazy the set was. Librarians don’t have the opportunity to sample every item they catalog. And so Plan Your Family languished on a library shelf for more than three decades, imbuing a thankfully minuscule number of junior college students with an alarmingly befuddled understanding of a woman’s reproductive system.

It’s a blessing that Plan Your Family wasn’t released a year later, when Roe v. Wade would have given In Sight & Sound a steeper mountain to climb—to the peril of any and all information seekers within earshot. Whether by a sincere desire to educate or because they had a contract to fulfill, In Sight & Sound—or Health Information Systems, Inc.—rallied to answer the call of women with questions about how to exercise their newly-won sexual autonomy. In the end, the project’s clumsy and misguided attempt to do right by women exists as an artifact of 1972’s acknowledgement of the sexual revolution, as well as the lack of tools and vocabulary needed to advance it.

Lindsay Oxford writes about vegan food for Sacramento News & Review and writes personal essays at igetbored.pizza.

grimchild:

Last year I was contacted to work on a Yu-Gi-Oh! movie. Unfortunately it fell through because Frankie Muniz refused to play Yugi Muto. Thats not true but check out this Blue Eyes White Dragon I painted.

Working on some content for various projects.  One of which is the Craft of the Wise The Pagan Witch Tradition for Basic Era Games and designed for Old-School Essentials.

Pyewacket


Pyewacket is a familiar spirit, similar in many ways to the witch's normal familiar but more powerful.  They usually take the shape of a larger cat, often of some rare breed.  A couple of things set it apart from normal cat kind.  A pyewacket usually has some odd features about it.  Odd colored fur like green or purple, mismatched eyes,  or even small horns. Most often the observer can't tell you why the cat looks odd, just that it does. The paws of a pyewacket are particularly dexterous, allowing them to pick up small objects with ease.  Also, all pyewackets can speak.  They typically know 3-4 languages including the language of cats and that of woodland creatures (Sylvan).  Additionally, they are all arrogant and convinced of their own superiority over most creatures.
Some occult scholars claim they are fae in nature, others claim they are more akin to the nether planes of the hells.  Whatever the case the pyewackets will not say, claiming only they have been part of this world for thousands of years and remember a time when they were worshipped like gods.
A pyewacket can also cast spells as 2nd level witch.

Pyewacket
(Old-School Essentials)
A large strange cat with odd features. It speaks to you in an intelligent but bored, condescending voice.
AC 7 [12], HD 2* (6 hp), Att 2 × claw (1d4) + spells, THAC0 19 [0], MV 90’ (30’) , SV D12 W13 P13 B15 S15 (E1), ML 7, AL Neutral, XP 35, NA 1d2 (1d6), TT None
▶ Attacks with clawa
▶ Cast spells as a Witch 2nd level
▶ Serves as a familiar to special witches.

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

—oOo—

What is it?Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players is a short one-shot with pre-generated players character Ducks.
It is a thirty-six page, full colour, 7.76 MB PDF.
Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! is well presented, nicely illustrated in a cartoonish style, and the maps are good.
Where is it set?Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is set in Sartar in Dragon Pass. The default location is 32 km north of Apple Lane in the lands of the Dinacoli, but it can be shifted to any location on the fringes between civilised lands and the wilderness.
Who do you play?Duck bandits. Or rather, Ducks who through misfortune and circumstance have turned to a life of banditry. Five pre-generated Ducks are included ready to play. They consist of two Odayla-worshipping Hunter brothers, an Uleria-worshipping ex-courtesan, a Humakt initiate, and an Orlanth initiate.
What do you need?Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! can be run just using RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The Glorantha Bestiary may be useful for information on Ducks and veteran Gloranthophiles may want to refer to the scenario ‘The Money Tree’ from RuneQuest, Third Edition for more information about the primary NPC in Yossarian’s Duck Bandits!
What do you get?Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is a tragi-comic affair about five Ducks who have been forced to turn to a life of crime and are about to commit their first act of banditry. This does not go quite as well as planned—for mostly tragic, comic reasons—but the Ducks do learn the whereabouts of even greater treasure. Unfortunately that involves a trek up a mountain and down again, a tight squeeze, some hungry, hungry trolls, and a ‘river rapids ride’ with Ducks!
Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is in part intended to be played for comedy, played out against a very big threat, but there is a lot of flavour and nuance to the scenario which stems in part from the interplay of the pre-generated Ducks and their relationships. This should drive the events of the scenario as much as its fairly simple plot, and should also provide plenty of opportunity for some good roleplaying too. Although the outcome of the scenario is not set in stone, there is a good chance that the player characters will come out of it heroes—after all, they are bandits more by circumstance rather than choice—and the authors do provide several adventure seeds should the Game Master want to continue with the further adventures of Yossarian’s Duck Bandits.
Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is about the right length to be run as a convention scenario and so could be run in a four-hour session. No advice is given to that end, but an experienced convention Game Master should have no issues with running the scenario.
Is it worth your time?Yes. Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players is a fun, exciting affair, easy to run as a one shot (or convention) scenario which demonstrates one of the odder aspects of Glorantha. Duck fans will love this, as will fans of the original ‘The Money Tree’ scenario, and they will also want a sequel,which the scenario deserves.
No. Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players involves Ducks and some people find Ducks silly.
Maybe. Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players involves Ducks and some people find Ducks silly, but there is plenty of tragedy in the scenario to counterpoint the silliness—and at the very least, it is just a one-shot. 

Been out of town for most of the week enjoying some time with my family, so I nearly missed this.


Thanksgiving Weekend Sale at DriveThruRPG

I have a lot of titles on sale for the next few hours.

Some of my Basic-era books,

• The Basic Witch: The Pumpkin Spice Witch Tradition
• The Children of the Gods: The Classical Witch for Basic Era Games
• Daughters of Darkness: The Mara Witch for Basic Era Games

And a few of my Swords & Wizardry books,

• The Warlock for Swords & Wizardry
• The Winter Witch for Swords & Wizardry

Grab them while you can!