Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Vornheim Running Low + Micro Review

Last night, or maybe this morning, +Lamentations of the Flame Princess posted this on Google+:
If you want a physical copy of Vornheim and you see it on a store shelf or in stock at your favorite webstore, GET IT. My distro warehouse person said last night they had 1 left, so whatever's in stock is pretty much it.

As you know, LotFP is a bit backlogged at the moment and Zak's next thing is A Red and Pleasant Land so it'll be a bit before we get to Vornheim again.

(Thing is with small press, resources are limited and tying them up with reprinting an older title often seems less interesting and lucrative than doing a new project because sales of the reprint would be considerably slower than a brand new thing, even if in the long run Vornheim has the greater sales power - which we can't know ahead of time...)
I haven't talked much about Vornheim on here, but it has slowly but surely worked its way into my gaming since I picked it up last summer. Regardless of what edition of D&D you may play, this book has great ideas that will find use in your games. I use the tables like Search The Body constantly, to give quirky little flavorful items to characters. The urbancrawl rules are great for coming up with city maps in a hurry. The names and titles tables are great for coming up with a name for that NPC that you had to come up with on the spur of the moment. This doesn't even scratch the surface of the cool tables that make up the front and back covers of this book. +Zak Smith has come up with two tables that allow you to figure out everything from the to hit and damage of NPCs, to the level of wizards, to the cost of beer in an inn by making a single die roll. These tables are beautiful and elegant in their simplicity and utility. I will use them for as long as I run fantasy games.

Basically, all of this means that if you see copies of Vornheim in your FLGS, or on your favorite web store, buy it. Buy it now while you can still get this in actual book form. It might be a while before you can get another chance.