Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Appreciation

Real life almost got in the way of my posting about this, which would have been ironic since I was the one pushing for more talk about this RPG. In case you missed my previous post about the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, just click there and get the basics. In case you're wondering why a bunch of bloggers are suddenly talking about this game, that isn't unintentional. This has rolled out of some G+ discussions on unnoticed free role-playing games. That's right, free.

The Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game is part of the retroclone movement, using the Open Gaming License (OGL) and various open gaming content (OGC) to create a "clone" or "emulator" of older, out of print games. One of the reasons that I like Basic Fantasy is because the creator (+Chris Gonnerman) didn't just make a clone, he also made Basic Fantasy his own with his own tweaks and changes to the material. Since I already talked about the game itself, and I am sure that some of the other bloggers on this project will do the same, I am going to focus instead on talking about some of the supplemental material that has sprung up around the game, and point out some of the bits that I particularly like. Basic Fantasy has developed quite a prolific community, a community that has  developed enough supplements and adventures (all available for free off of the Basic Fantasy website linked about) that you can get a campaign off the ground and go for (and this may or may not be hyperbole) a year or two without having to spend any money (except maybe your printing costs). This is DIY gaming at its finest.

While Basic Fantasy is available in at cost print editions on Lulu, the community is pretty much self-contained around the game's site. You aren't going to find Basic Fantasy over at RPGNow, and I think that is a strength. It does mean that it can be a bit harder for people to stumble onto this game, but that is what blog posts like this are working to overcome.

So, let's talk about some of the supplemental material that's available.

I like skills. Not having them is, for me, one of the weak points of old school gaming. Omer Golan-Joel came up with a short supplement that give you rules for skills, working off of the Ability Roll rules that are in the core rules of the game. I like the simplicity of the approach, and I like how the rules are robust despite this simplicity. If you're like me, and I know I am, this supplement is something that you will be attaching to your set of the core rules.

Chris Gonnerman, the creator of Basic Fantasy has a cool supplement for Sentient Weapons for the game. Stormbringer, anyone?

And, speaking of Stormbringer, or RuneQuest, Joe Carruthers has put together a supplement called Basic Fantasy Questing that merges some of the concepts of d100-based role-playing games with the core Basic Fantasy rules. There are some neat ideas in this supplement that creates a fusion of two different approaches to fantasy role-playing games.

Who doesn't like have more magic? Libram Magica by R. Kevin Smoot and various other contributors, gives you a whole parcel of new spells and options for your spell casting characters.

Honestly, these four supplements are just the tip of the Basic Fantasy iceberg. Check out the Downloads and Showcase pages for a lot more stuff. Even if you don't use the Basic Fantasy game, all of these things (new spell options, new classes, campaign settings and modules) can all be used with your existing old school games with little to no conversion work. That's just a small part of what makes all of these games so cool.

Like what you see? Tell me about some of your new or old favorite stuff from the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

From The Fevered Imaginings of Rafael Chandler Comes The Teratic Tome!

Looking for cool monsters for your old school games? Look no further than Evolved Grottoes & Griffons: Teratic Tome from +Rafael Chandler. This volume of new and original monsters was created for use with OSRIC, but as we all know it can easily be adapted to any old school game, with a little bit of effort.

Deities and Demigods Returns

As I blogged earlier today (while still asleep I might add), Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf/RPGNow/DriveThruRPG unleashed upon the gaming world a new site: dndclassics.com. Using a customized interface for D&D fans, WotC has begun the rollout of classic D&D materials for every edition in PDF form. These are brand new scans: with bookmarks and internal hyperlinking. Of the batch that was in the free reviewer downloads, one PDF stood out for me: Deities & Demigods for AD&D. This book was my one gamer's regret. I had a copy of the first printing (with the Cthulhu Mythos and Elric stuff), but I had to sell it during my college years to help offset the ridiculous price of textbooks.

I've missed that book and it is one of the treasures of gaming, which of course means that it is horribly expensive to try to recover (if someone has a copy that they want to let go of).

Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game

I don't point to other sites and say "Download this!" very often, but a recent post made by +Erik Tenkar over at his blog made me realize that I should post about Basic Fantasy here at the blog, and talk about it more. I think part of the reason that I don't push things more is that I'm not really an OSR person, so I don't feel the need to talk about games unless it is during play.

When I made my recent return to fantasy role-playing this year, one of the things that I really wanted to look for were games that were simple and streamlined. Not to knock those who like rules heavy games with a lot of crunch to them, that approach just doesn't appeal to me. Because of this, I starting looking more closely at a lot of retroclones. For my online game, I eventually ended up settling on Swords & Wizardry, but Basic Fantasy was a close second. A very close second.

This game is a retroclone, in a strict sense, but the game (and the community of fan developers that have sprung up around it) doesn't shy away from "newer" ideas, like skills, classes beyond the ones from old school games and the pages of old Dragon magazines. The people take the game into the directions that they want to go, and I respect that. If there were flaws to Basic Fantasy and its community, I would say that it would probably be that there hasn't been the branching into other genres for the game (like Goblinoid Games has done with Mutant Future). It isn't like that cannot be done with Basic Fantasy, but it is interesting that it hasn't been done yet. Maybe I just haven't seen it. I will admit that I don't spend a lot of time around forums, so I could have missed something on the site's forums.

What is amazing about Basic Fantasy and the fan community around it is the sheer volume of material that is available for free, in PDF and in the OpenDocument format used by LibreOffice. It has embraced open gaming and run with it. There are so many campaigns, modules and rules supplements that are available on the Basic Fantasy downloads page that you could easily run a game for years, and not have to pay for a single thing. You can buy print versions of the core rules, and some of the modules on Lulu.com, and if you like what you see on their site I really recommend throwing some monetary support their way. I've been thinking of picking up a print copy of Basic Fantasy as a birthday gift for myself. I really should get around to doing that.

Sort of like with my post about Warrior & Wizard, this is one of those retroclones that sort of slips through the cracks in discussions about these things. With Basic Fantasy, I think a lot of that is because the creator doesn't have all of his stuff up on RPGNow/DriveThruRPG, like some of the other retroclone/OSR publishers. I like the attitude of doing it themselves, it hits that DIY mentality that I like so much, but I thought that it would be nice to also give them a little bit of a mention outside of their circles. If you want a well-done free RPG that is every bit as good as any of the other OSR/retroclone stuff being sold (or offered for free) out there, and you haven't checked out the +Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, you really should check it out now. You're missing out.

Atlantis! An Old School Fantasy Role-Playing Game

Back a year or so ago, in the early days of my involvement with Google+, I started thinking about a game that was a hack of the Swords & Wizardry Whitebox rules. I called this game Atlantis!, and yes the exclamation point was intentional. I found an appropriate piece of art and the concept cover was born (you'll find the most recent version of that concept art at right).

I like the Whitebox rules for Swords & Wizardry. They are simple and to the point, streamlined and yet they give you plenty of options for playing a fantasy game. My only complaint is that there isn't a thief class, which is understandable since the original game that it is emulating didn't have one either, but it is easy enough to fix this.

I ran a Whitebox game for a while on G+ Hangouts, until we "upgraded" to the Core version of Swords & Wizardry. I have a lot of respect for what can be done with a very few rules in a game. I went through my period, like a lot of gamers I think, during the 90s when I wanted a lot of rules in my games, even when I didn't really use them. The rules were comforting in a way, letting us all know that thing were covered if we needed them to be. Nowadays, that style just isn't my thing. I've played this way for a while now, but I have definitely become much more comfortable with a "rulings, not rules" style of play over the last few years. There's a trust there that everyone at the table is there to have fun and not screw each other around that I kind of like again.

So, Atlantis!

Most of my Swords & Wizardry gaming has grown out of my enjoyment of a sort of pulp style of fantasy fiction: Moorcock, Carter, Leiber, and Howard forming a lot of my ideas for what fits into a fun fantasy role-playing game. This makes sense since it is the sorts of fantasy that the designers of D&D were reading as they played and created the game. It is a fun style of fantasy, heavy on action and magic (some of the times), and people living their lives large. Beautiful women used their charms to bewitch the heroic leads, almost always against the backdrop of a world of ancient, decaying graces that are giving away to a new age.

That is what I am looking at with this game. Atlantis is sort of like my analogue to Moorcock's Melnibone. Except where Melniboneans were cruel and inhuman monsters subjugating the world through terror and magic, the Atlanteans brought culture, society and order to the world. This sets the stage for the Law versus Chaos conflict in old school fantasy games, with a world where the premier civilization is in its twilight days, but the light has not yet gone out. A world where chaos and weird monsters are again peaking out from the shadowy corners of the world, those things that will take stalwart adventurers to hold back. The great cycle of the conflict between Law and Chaos turns, and the world is changing....but into what? That, of course is up to those bands of adventurers that are around the world, trying to hold back the night.

From the Far East, there are the blue-skinned Strangers, with their sky ship and their strange weapons, and stranger magics. Some have even seen that there are Strangers with more than one set of arms, even. There are disenfranchised Amazons, wandering the world and seeking to right the wrongs within this darkening world, and bring their strange Amazonian ideals of peace and love through strength to the rest of the world. Barbarians are everywhere, causing destruction and seeking the chaos that can be found in the world. There are still the Atlantean Sword Brothers and Sisters, some of the best warriors to be found in the world, selling or giving the swords and their bodies to keep the light of civilization from winking out completely. There is magic. There are monsters.

One thing that I find about an old school fantasy approach, particularly with older versions of D&D, is that they tend to be happening during the apocalyptic times, when things are going bad but there is still a chance for change. That is one of the things that influences Atlantis! in my mind. This is not some idyllic time. This is not an age after things have happened and people are trying to survive. This is the time of change, the time of battle, when strength of mind, of body, of will can make a difference to those who are willing to try to make a change in the world. And that, to me, is one of the things that makes RPGs so much fun. You can be that person who steps up and says "None shall pass!" and make that stand, whether or not the odds are in your favor. Hopefully, this will come through in the final version of Atlantis!

Swords & Wizardry on G+

This past weekend a new "function" rolled out on Google Plus, called communities. Communities are sort of like forums, but in the same style and formatting as G+ proper. It is a nice functionality because it does away with some of the things that I hate about online forums and it allows you to interact with new people that you may not know, without having to leave the relative safety of your Google+ stream.

The Swords & Wizardry Discussion community sort of exploded (in a good way), but we are looking for more people to join in on the discussions. Matt Finch and various of the Frog God Games people are already active in the community, as well as some of your favorite Swords & Wizardry bloggers. Click on the image, and come join us.

New Spells for Your Swords & Wizardry and Old School Games

I like spells in my fantasy games. I like the feeling of magic and wonder that they bring to a world. I also like for the players in my games to have options for their characters. The linked PDF has 26 spells that are new to Swords & Wizardry, converted from the SRDs of OpenQuest and the Renaissance system. I am pretty sure that none of them have appeared in an old school or d20 game. The spells are split between Cleric and Magic-User spells, so there is something of use to either class.

Some of these spells are a bit non-traditional, but that is why I am sharing them.

The PDF can be found here.

Enthusiasm and Professionalism in Tabletop RPG Publishing

About this time last year I wrote a post about publishers rushing games in order to have them for sale at Gen Con, only to have to release a new edition within months because the rush job missed so many errors. The business of RPG publishing sometimes seems to forget the fact that there's more to this than just having something to sell at Gen Con.

The polar opposite of this attitude is the "hobbyist," those who publish because they love games more than they understand how a business really works. A good example of this would be the current (as of the date of this post) Kickstarter being run by Frog God Games for a new edition of their Swords & Wizardry Complete, in hardcover format. They previously released a hardcover edition that was marred by printing errors and poor follow up and customer service. I guess some lessons are difficult to learn.

I do not think there is any nobility in publishing something from the stance of being a hobbyist, so if your responses to this opinion post are based from that mindset don't bother.

Simple Skill System For Swords & Wizardry

Admittedly, not everyone want skills in their old school games, this post is for those people who do want to add the option to their games. This is written for Swords & Wizardry but could easily be ported to any old school game. The genesis of this particular variant comes from a forum post made by one of the players in the G+ Swords & Wizardry game. This is still in a very rough form, and I am posting this mostly to get it out of the headspace and into a format that can be commented upon.

The basic mechanic is that the player rolls 2d6, adds any modifiers from their character's Ability Scores, and compares it to a target number for the difficulty of the task (as set by the Referee). If the roll + modifiers is higher than the target, the character succeeds at using that skill.

Difficulty Determined by Referee	Die Roll
Simple Task	No Roll
Hard Task	9+
Difficult Task	12+

The referee should keep the difficulty of the task in mind at all time, and should also consider the general level/competency of the character in mind as well. What is a simple task for a 6th level character might be Hard or Difficult for a 1st level character. The referee is always cautioned to err in favor of the character when determining the difficulty of a task.

Modifiers are determined by the Dexterity or Intelligence of the character, using the following table:

Score	Bonus/Penalty
3-8	-1
9-12	+0
13-18	+1

If a skill is something that is dependent on the character's overall agility and coordination, use the Dexterity score's bonus/penalty. If the skill is something that depends on the overall mental capabilities of the character, use the Intelligence score's bonus/penalty.

At this point I do not include Thief skills, because I think that those skills should be a protected niche of that character class. An option for Thieves could be to convert the Thief "skills" over to skills in this system and just give the Thief a special modifier, like half their level. I'm not 100% on this specific listing of skills just yet. This is a part that I am still turning over in my head (yes, this list of skills was taken from an OGL source, and it will be properly attributed, should this idea make it into a polished and final form).

Arcana: Your character’s knowledge of the unknown and the magical within the game world. Note that this doesn't give a character any sort of spellcasting ability.

Athletics: Anything involving physical or athletic activities, including climbing, swimming, and acrobatics.

Communication: Your character’s ability to communicate with others, but not to persuade (see Social, below).

Focus: Anything involving concentration, observation or perception.

Nature/Outdoors: How good your character is at things like camping, fishing, hunting, survival, navigation and horseback riding.

Enterprise: Your character’s knowledge of how businesses and finance work.

Investigation: Your character’s knowledge of how to look for clues, searching an area for hidden things, and the like.

Languages: How good your character is at speaking/reading/understanding a particular language. Each language counts as a different skill.

Military Sciences: Your character’s knowledge of tactics and strategy, as well as military history.

Profession: This is what your character does for a living when not out adventuring. Sample professions can be: Blacksmith, Cooper, Brewer, Weaver, Veterinarian, and etc. The profession must be specified, and this skill can be taken multiple times for multiple professions.

Performance: Your character’s ability to perform in front of others, this can be acting, singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument.

Social: Anything involving using your charm or persuasion

Technical: How good your character is at technical tasks such as mechanics.

Transportation: How good your character is at driving or piloting vehicles. Also allows the character some basic mechanical knowledge of their preferred vehicle.

Skills do not have ranks, they are either trained (i.e. the character has that skill) or untrained. All character classes start play with one skill at first level, and gain another every three levels.

Random Spellbooks For Swords & Wizardry

One of the benefits to a game like Swords & Wizardry is the ability to quickly generate a character. Roll the dice, pick the class, fill out hit points and you are pretty much ready to go. The only thing that can slow down the process is figuring out what spells the Magic-User can have access to when starting out. The assumption is that a fledgling magic-user is given a (mostly blank) spellbook when completing their studies that has a handful of spells scribed into it by their teacher. The question is, what spells are in their spellbook?

This post helps you to quickly, and randomly, generate a starting spellbook for your first level magic-user. (It can also be handy for spellbooks found in the loot while dungeon-crawling.) We assume that your character's teacher is not going to be too helpful and provide them with too much magic...just because powerful magic-users tend to be covetous of the knowledge that they have gathered, and paranoid about how others might use that power against them. One house rule that I have for my Swords & Wizardry games is that Read Magic is a class ability for magic-users, rather than a spell. It seems silly that a magic-user would undergo that much sorcerous training and not understand magical languages.

Spellbooks are a repository of the accumulated magical knowledge of the magic-user, part documentation for their spells and part magical diary of their journey of discovery. A spellbook is very important to a magic-user because it contains the formulas and memory devices for each spell that they use. Losing a spellbook means that a magic-user is unable to rememorize spells as casting causes the spells to vanish from their minds. This makes a spellbook more valuable than gold to a magic-user.

Warrior & Wizard RPG: The Little Retroclone That Could

One of the hot things in tabletop RPGs right now is the "retroclone." For those who may read this and not know, a retroclone is a reproduction of an out of print game that relies on the legal concept that you cannot copyright game mechanics, only your exact wording of those mechanics. That basically means that anyone can come along and rewrite the expression of your rules with a completely new wording (that obviously explains the same basic mechanics underneath) and have a new game. This is something that has been happening a lot the last few years in tabletop gaming. The Open Gaming License and the various d20 SRDs have gone far in creating the foundation on which clones of earlier editions of D&D can be built, making these the most popular retroclones out and about. This makes sense, since D&D is the dog that wags the tail of tabletop gaming.

There have been other retroclones as well. There was a World of Darkness clone that came and went, which apparently disappeared because the creator had some legal issues that weren't properly skirted in his writing. I think it is still out on the internet in a place or two. Phil Reed did a super-heroic retroclone called 4Color that never really seemed to catch on like it should have. I'm sure that there are others out there that I don't know about, either.

Early today on G+ I posted a link to Warrior & Wizard, a retroclone of the old, out of print, Fantasy Trip game. It is a nice piece of work from author Chris Goodwin that really deserves more attention than it has probably received. That's why I made that post, and that is why I am making this post on my blog. Warrior & Wizard is available in two versions (both with the same text), one released under the OGL (to better allow mingling with other OGL-released open content) and one released under a creative commons license.

I put a copy and paste of the original author's document up in an editable format Google Document in my Google Drive folder, so that people can find and easily download something. I hope that you check it out, enjoy what you see and work up your own hack of the game. Hopefully the creator sees all of this and it spurs him to some further work.

Here's the link to Warrior & Wizard on Google Drive. [8/17/2018 Update: Because of the Kickstarter bringing back Steve Jackson's first RPG, The Fantasy Trip, I've taken down the link to this project.]

What unrepresented retroclone do you think needs more attention? You can mention it in the comments. Let's make this about those games that really aren't getting a lot of attention already out with other bloggers or forums. I think most of the D&D clones get enough attention already. What isn't being talked about out there?

Eldritch Enterprise's The Forest of Deceit in Review

I received a PDF in my email recent, a module from Eldritch Enterprises called Forest of Deceit ($7.50 in PDF form over at RPGNow). This is part of a series of modules that feature contributions from names that should be familiar to fans of Old School D&D: Frank Mentzer and James Ward. Forest of Deceit, however is by Christopher Clark, rather than either of those two men.

Forest of Deceit is intended as the introductory or "set up" module to a series of interlinked adventures that flesh out an area of the setting. According to the module, there are three more "chapters" or adventures for this setting yet to come. This can be good or bad for GMs, because if the adventures don't catch on (or there are long delays between each release) then that can adversely impact the campaign.

While designated as an adventure, what Forest of Deceit really is would be a series of short woodland encounters, intended to be used as the adventurers travel to the city of Namar (to be outlined in an upcoming adventure). The encounters are interesting, and are linked thematically by being in a wooded area. There's nothing that really ties these encounters to the Forest of the title, so a GM could easily drop them into any sort of woodlands encounter. As a matter of fact, I may use one or two of these encounters in my own Swords & Wizardry Whitebox campaign.

My main complaint with this adventure is that a lot of pages are wasted by reprinting the monsters. Each encounter is self-contained, with its own monster write ups, but each of these write ups is then reprinted in a six page bestiary section. Those six pages could have been better utilized with another encounter or two. And while speaking of the monsters, I have to say that I found the "shorthand" used to give stats to the monsters in this module a bit confusing, since they don't exactly sync up to any of the old (or new) school fantasy games. Since most of these monsters are fairly common, finding write ups for them in your system of choice shouldn't be hard, but I think that I would have preferred if they had gone with using the stats from an existing Old School game (anything from Castles & Crusades to Labyrinth Lord to Swords & Wizardry) rather than this approach. The OGL has made it so much easier to create compatible materials for so many games that this would have been so much easier to make something compatible than to come up with yet another way to reinvent the wheel of monster write ups.

Is this module worth the money? Well, that's a tricky question. I'm sure that someone will find a use for the material in this module, so for some that answer is an obvious yes. However, at $7.50 (for the PDF) for 34 pages of text and front and back covers, I am not sure if this is worth the money as it is. I think that this module could be much more successful if the encounters from it are integrated into a book with more of the Namar setting information integrated. That way GMs and players won't be left hanging when they finish these encounters but still do not have the city that is supposed to be their destination. With these couple of flaws, I can see this PDF being worth more in the range of $2-$3, rather than the $7.50 that it costs. There's too much introduction and not enough follow up to really make this worth the price of admission.

Hopefully this module does not set the tone for other Eldritch Enterprises modules. I would like to think that Ward and Mentzer have a lot more experience at setting up these sorts of modules, but only time will tell.

The Dogma of Appendix N in Fantasy Gaming

One thing that I never thought that AD&D/D&D was very good at was simulating the fiction of the fabled Appendix N. I don't think that it really needed to because, even as a kid, I always felt that the books in Appendix N were meant more as a guideline to inspirations than what the game was actually supposed to be about. This is supposition, but in hindsight I get the impression that after D&D came out Gygax & Co. were surprised to find out that their tastes in reading weren't as universal as they thought that they would be and that is what led to the inclusion of the Appendix N in AD&D 1e. It seems almost to be an early example of the geek social fallacies in action.

Here's the problem. What might have been intended as a "here's where our head is at with fantasy fiction, some stuff that we like that might make your D&D games cool" has been turned into a near dogmatic "THIS IS WHAT D&D IS SUPPOSED TO BE!!" by more than a few fans and publishers (who are obviously fans as well). The cries of "Appendix N Gaming!" seem to be calling for a game that never was, or at least a game that I can say that I never saw. I do think that if we are going to call for more Appendix N games, we definitely need to have more games inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Recent sad performances in the Box Office aside, Planetary Romance and Lost Worlds styles of games are sorely underrepresented in published RPGs. I understand the reticence of publishers, considering the overzealous nature of the Burroughs Estate when defending what it believes to be its rights.

Anyway.

I guess what I am saying is that we need to look at things like Appendix N for what it was intended to be: an inspiration upon the games of those who might not have read the same books as the Founding Fathers of gaming. The books listed therein are not the destination of a fantasy game, but they are the journey towards it.

Law Versus Chaos in RPGs: The Universal Church of Truth in My Games

This is a sort of "posting of notes" or "working out the words to a tune in my head" type of post. If these ideas seem rambling, or not finished, that is probably true. I just want to get some of them out and onto "paper," probably mostly because of the online game that I am going to be running soon. Warning: Metaphor heavy posting follows the jump.

Castles and Crusades Classic Monsters: The Manual

Classic Monsters is a compilation of some of the classic monsters of old school gaming, taken from the open content of the first Tome of Horrors and converted to the C&C system. This book greatly expands the amount of monster available from the Monsters & Treasure book, and would be a boon to anyone running a game of Castles & Crusades. The art is up to the usual high standards of a Castles & Crusades book, and the layout follows the crisp and clean standards of the other C&C books.

Unfortunately, among the weird and wacky monsters from the early days of the first edition of the Advanced Game, the one glaring absence would be the demons and devils. Yes, it would be easy enough to convert these...but they just seems to be much too noticeable in their absence, particularly in comparison to other much more thorough old school monster manuals that are on the market. Does this render Classic Monsters useless, or make it a less attractive purchase? Well, no to either of those questions. Classic Monsters is definitely much more affordable (and likely easier to find) than those other monster manuals, and there are still plenty of other monsters that are available in this book. With a couple of hundred new monsters, there is still a lot of meat for a Castle Keeper in this volume.

Comparing this book to the recent edition of the Tome of Horrors Complete (ToHC) for Swords & Wizardry, would not be a fair comparison for Classic Monsters only because ToHC has five times the page count of Classic Monsters. It does, however, not shy away from the conversion of Devils and Demons. You can almost call these infernal creatures the Great Schism of AD&D, as it was their removal from AD&D 2e that upset a good number of gamers who felt that the new edition was overly sanitized after the "Satanic" scares over D&D of the 80s. I am certainly not accusing Castles & Crusades or Classic Monsters of being sanitized, but for me this is a glaring omission. I like the existence of the infernal to test the goodness of characters, and as a fan of writers like Michael Moorcock I like to emulate his fiction with demonic characters. Not that I would not be able to adapt or convert this material myself, if I wanted. I don't want people thinking that Classic Monsters is a bad book, because it certainly isn't. I just feel that it could have been a better book with the addition of more material. Who knows, maybe someone at Troll Lord Games will want to do something along the lines of the great old Demons series for AD&D that Mayfair Games put out all those years ago.

One of the strong points of the write-ups for these monsters is the combat section. For those less experienced Castle Keepers, or those who were not around in the hobby when many of these creatures were first published, having that brief outline of how each monster acts in combat can be very useful. There is also enough ecology information to be able to place these monsters into an adventure in a way that makes some logical sense.

Yes, this is a volume that adapts material that is already available, but sometimes not having to do the conversion work is worth the price of admission, and not everyone still has copies of the original MM2 or the Fiend Folio around to use for their Castles & Crusades games. Because of that, this book is useful and a good addition to anyone's Castles & Crusades library.

You can purchase the PDF of this book here, and if you keep the affiliate code, a portion of the sale will benefit this blog and allow for more things to be reviewed.

G+ RPG Recruitment

Are you on Google+? Do you like old school fantasy gaming? I am recruiting for a Swords & Wizardry Whitebox game that will be played on Google+ hangouts, Tuesdays at about 10pm EST. Most of the goal is to introduce an online friend to tabletop role-playing (or the approximation of it online). You can find the PDF at the above link, so there is no cost to you to play. My G+ profile can be found in the column at the right, and you can express your interest in the comments below. This will be a G+ hangouts game, so you have to be set up over there to play.

There's a little interest already, so we are probably looking for two more players.

Talking About D101 Games' OpenQuest

OpenQuest is a game that readily admits to standing on the shoulders of giants. Much of the foundation of it, as a game, were laid by the multitude of designers from Chaosium and Mongoose working on Basic Roleplaying and the games that it inspired. That does not, however, make this a knock off by any stretch of the imagination. Like many games being put out today, particularly those among the retro-gaming and Old School Renaissance movements, OpenQuest is first and foremost a labor of love by its creator Newt Newport.

Skills in Castles & Crusades: Take 2

Readers of this blog and my Twitter stream know that I've become a fan of Troll Lord Games' Castles & Crusades. Just today on Twitter I mentioned wanting to see GammaSIEGE, a Castles & Crusades take on post-apocalyptic gaming that would combine the best elements of things like Gamma World and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and bring it together under the mechanics of Castles & Crusades. That tweet got me thinking about the game and tweaks to it I would like. I know I am in a minority, it seems, but I would like a skill system for Castles & Crusades. It's just the way that I role.

This is actually my second attempt at a skill system. My first (found here) was based off of the StarSIEGE game and hewed closer to the Siege Engine. This version is (to me) a bit simpler and is influenced by skill systems in more old school games.

I've uploaded a PDF to Google Docs that you can find here. I'm curious to hear comments and feedback, either in the comments for this post or in my Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Enjoy.

Swords and Wizardry

So, the other day I found a "new to me" retro clone of OD&D called Swords and Wizardry. This game is brought to us by one of the people responsible for OSRIC, another retro clone built under the OGL that emulates the AD&D experience instead.

Not a big game by any stretch of the imagination, which is a plus to me, Swords and Wizardry does a good job of emulating that old school fun that was OD&D. I miss my little booklets, stolen by some visitor to my apartment god only knows when. But I got hours and hours of enjoyment out of that game, which lead into almost 30 years of gaming now.

Frankly, I haven't had the chance to read the rules that thoroughly yet. But, what I have seen I do like. I am probably going to get around to ordering an actual print copy so I can really give the game a reading. What I have seen so far makes me want to read more and (more importantly as a litmus test for an RPG) it makes me want to game. So, for now I wanted to share the existence of this with everybody and I will post more when I have a chance to digest the game more thoroughly.