Rendezvous with Ruinator—Download!

Thanks to a question from RavenFeast, I finally got off my duff and decided to make one of my NTRPGCon adventures available here. I have several more of these that I intend to put up for sale somewhere, someday, but for now at least, you can grab a free copy of the post-apocalyptic "adventure" Rendezvous with Ruinator.

I put adventure in quotes up there because this is an adventure in only the loosest sense. It's really a set of notes that I used to run the adventure from. There are no stats, no numbers, no charts. Unique monsters, NPCs, and hazards are mentioned without any guidance on what they look like or what their abilities are. The whole thing is only 8 pages, including a cover and two-page map, and the map is only a schematic; it shows where places are in relation to other places but doesn't include doors or hallways.

That's how I enjoy running adventures at NTRPGCon—I rough out a general plan and then have the greatest fun riffing off the players' ideas and interactions. That goes double for Gamma World—I have a core group of terrific players who make it to my GW game every year, and they never fail to amaze me with their inventiveness and humor. With a group like that, the adventure practically writes itself.

I use 1st-edition Gamma World rules for these sessions in Dallas, but any post-apocalyptic game will work for Rendezvous with Ruinator. Mutant Future from Goblinoid Games and Broken Urthe from Wizardawn Entertainment are both fine, free, OSR alternatives, if you don't have a copy of Gamma World lurking on your shelves anymore.

A bit of background might help GMs get into this. My Dallas GW adventures are all based around the framing story of Professor Monkey, a super-intelligent chimp who roams Gamma Terra at the helm of the lumbering "Radium Powered Lab." Think a CDC emergency-response laboratory on legs, built in the wacked-out 23rd century. Prof. Monkey is part altruistic world-saver and part megolamaniacal empire-builder. He's assembled a crack team of lab assistants (who are always busy doing science at the Radium Powered Lab) and go-fers (the "#1 Fetch-It Squad"), who do the dangerous work of venturing out into the irradiated wilderness to investigate enigmas and bring artifacts back to the lab. Those are the PCs. With Prof. Monkey as a patron, the characters can start these adventures well-equipped and with a definite mission—which usually is, "find out what this funny blip on the Scan-o-Tron 360 is and bring me back something I can use from it."

Ruinator is a gigantic war machine a third of a mile long with a complex, thoroughly dysfunctional society living inside it. You could be forgiven for thinking that an adventure set inside an ancient war machine might lean heavily on the combat lever, but this is actually one of the most diplomacy-rich settings I've ever concocted. There's plenty of opportunity for whipping guns out of holsters and slicing off arms with vibroblades, but in the end, talking is what's going to win the day inside Ruinator.

And that's enough talking from me. Download Ruinator and have fun!

• Rendezvous with Ruinator - PDF Download

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea

• Astonishingly sturdy box containing:
• 252-page Player's Manual
• 235-page Referee's Manual
• 22 x 28-inch black & white map of Hyperborea
• 6 character sheets
• set of 6 uninked polyhedral dice
• written by Jeffrey Talanian, illustrated by Ian Baggley
• published 2012 by North Wind Adventures
• $10 PDF, $50 print, or $20 for just the Player's Manual

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea (there are no good abbreviations for this title, but we'll go with AS&SH because that's what the publisher uses) is a game that I wound up not liking as much as I expected to. It's a fine set of rules and a fine setting that make an odd package.

The Rules

The rules can be summed up very easily. What you have in the AS&SH rules is a spruced up version of AD&D. The departures are many, small, and mostly improvements. A few examples:

• The "Open Doors" and "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" columns from AD&D's Strength table are renamed "Test of" and "Extraordinary Feat of" and extended to the Dexterity and Constitution tables, too.
• Clerics have a percentage change to learn spells similar to magicians.
• Turning undead is done with a d12, and Charisma affects the odds.
• Thief skills advance on a fixed schedule as in AD&D but are rolled on a d12. Having a score of 16+ in the attribute associated with each skill gets you a +1 on the roll.
• AC descends but starts at 9 instead of 10. An interesting twist is that medium armor also blocks 1 point of damage from attacks and heavy armor blocks 2 points.
• XP tables cover levels 1-12. Characters can build strongholds and attract followers at level 9.
• The combat rules give a knowing nod to Chainmail in their handling of weapon classes and first strike capability.
• Combat rounds are 10 seconds, not 1 minute.
• The section on Advanced Combat includes fun options such as disarming, parrying, and shield tricks.
• There is just one saving throw and it's the same for everyone, but each class gets bonuses in specific circumstances and there are further modifiers for high ability scores. 
• Characters are unconscious at 0 hps but can be awakened; stable at -1 to -3; dying at -4 to -9 (losing 1 hp/round); and dead at -10.
• XP are awarded for monsters and treasure as usual but also at a discretionary rate for roleplaying, being clever, attaining goals, showing up for the game, and other "soft" achievements, similar to 2nd Edition. 
• Task resolution is handled with the "Test of" and "Extraordinary Feat of" columns where the physical attributes are concerned. In other cases, there's a generic table assigning d6 values to simple, moderate, challenging, difficult, and very difficult tasks. 

More from Crypts & Things

To wrap up my look at Crypts & Things, I want to post two quotes from the book. These two quotes probably do a better job, in a few words, of summarizing the ambience of C&T than all my meanderings from the previous post.

The first pull is from the section on magic items:

Magic items in Crypts and Things are rare and special items. They are artefacts of ancient wars and demonic summonings, and as a result their purpose is always malign. At most only one is found in a particular Crypt or adventure and they are the stuff of legend and renown. A figurative double-edged sword, magic treasures always endow at least one curse for each blessing they bestow. Often their long-term use is hazardous to the mental and physical well being of the character that possesses them.

Only 20 magic items are described in the book, and all of them bear out that dire prophecy.

The second quote is from Appendix A, "The Features of Crypt* & Things."

The gods have deserted mankind in the dim past and the only magicians left are of the self-serving, amoral or simply just plain bad variety. There is an absence of powerful Wizard Guilds/Schools who police magicians in the field and instil upon their students a code of good ethical behaviour toward their fellow man. Instead you are left with the choice of serving an apprenticeship with evil and manipulative Sorcerers or joining a cult to grab crumbs of magical power thrown down from the table by the Sorcerer/Ranking Priest. Students who rise in power under this system are likely to end up disposed of in some gruesome but useful manner so they never challenge their master’s power.

Exactly right.

* I'd just like to point out that that's D101's typo, not mine. I know the name of the game is Crypts & Things.

Crypts & Things

• 150-pages
• By Newt Newport, with Akrasia
• published 2011 by D101 Games
• $40.44 in hardcover, $23.59 in softcover, $12 PDF.

Crypts & Things bills itself as a Swords & Wizardry variant. It would be truer to call it a S&W alternative, since you don't need the S&W rules to play Crypts & Things. It's a complete game by itself; the Crypts & Things rulebook contains all the S&W rules needed to play.

Where S&W is a straight-up adaptation of OD&D that stays true to the original game's non-setting, C&T packages those rules with a very particular approach to campaigning. What you get in C&T is an S&W-esque game in the world of Zarth, a setting heavily flavored with great dollops of the Hyborian Age, Melnibone, Nehwon, Zothique, and Xiccarph. 

Right there I've listed the works of four of my five favorite authors, so it should come as no surprise that I like C&T.

Another Shipment from Lulu.com

A new round of books from Lulu.com arrived on my doorstep last week. Ordering those Swords & Wizardry books a month ago was so much fun that when Lulu sent me a great coupon, I was hooked and reeled in. I don’t know why ordering a book from Lulu is more exciting than ordering one from, say, Amazon, but it is. I suspect it’s because these books weren’t just pulled off a shelf in a warehouse, they were printed just for me. They are mine in a way that other books can’t be.

Like the S&W titles, I’ve had PDFs of these titles for a long time. The fact that I ordered physical books is proof that I have more than a professional curiosity about these games: they’ve already impressed me and I’d like to actually run them around a table sometime.

I’m enough of a realist to know that, even with the books living on my shelf, the odds of an actual game happening are less than 50/50. If I get to run even two of these for friends or at conventions, I’ll be pleased. (Maybe next year’s NTRPGCon should be an all-Print On Demand show for me.)

Over the next few weeks, I intend to write actual reviews of these games. Only two of them are D&D/S&W/L&L/LotFP variants, which makes them more interesting (to me, anyway) than titles about which little more can be said than “it’s yet another version of OD&D.” Not that I have anything against those, but they’ve been piling up rapidly over the last few years and I’m nearing my saturation point.

Brood Pit of the Frog God

I've been itching to do more Adventure Notebooks for a while, and what better way to mark its return than with a small tribute to the outstanding Swords & Wizardry adventure I played at PaizoCon last weekend, run by Frog God Games' Bill Webb. Regardless of whether you're a fan of S&W or even of the OSR, you should grab the PDF of the S&W Monster Book from Lulu.com or wherever else it's available. If you play S&W, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or any of the seemingly endless other OD&D/BX-derived old-school variants, then you absolutely want this book. If you play with rules that don't trace their lineage to OD&D, you'll find that while the Monster Book contains a lot of exactly what you expect, it also includes enough oddball entities and familiar creatures twisted into the unfamiliar to make the PDF well worth its $5 pricetag. This Adventure Notebook pretty much leaped full-grown into my head the moment I read the entry for the froglum, and the froglum isn't the only monster that's had that effect.

• Brood Pit of the Frog God

My Father's Day Present to Me: Swords & Wizardry

While I was at North Texas RPG Con a few weeks ago, I got the chance to play in one of Bill Webb's Swords & Wizardry adventures. The six-hour session was terrific fun. I've read the S&W White Box and Core Rules PDFs numerous times, but this was the first time I actually played them at a table. It wasn't exactly a new experience, since I've played my share and a bit more of OD&D, but it was so much fun and so easy to play (compared to our efforts a few years ago to play OD&D itself from the three Little Brown Books) that I decided to reward Frog God and Mythmere by spending some actual money on Swords & Wizardry.

Almost all of my RPG purchasing these days is PDFs, since I actually like reading them on my tablet. (That's how I write and run most adventures, now too: directly from my tablet using Evernote.) I hit Lulu.com, found suitable versions of the Core Rules and Monster Book, and grabbed Ruins & Ronin at the same time just because it's so cool (I came this close to running a session of R&R at NTRPGCon this year). While I was there, I grabbed the full six-issue run of Knockspell PDFs, too, based almost entirely on their tables of contents that indicated one issue contained guidelines for constructing an adventure using Scrabble tiles. I love that sort of thing ... .

The books arrived from Lulu quicker than I expected. The covers are a bit dark, but that's a print-on-demand thing. (Tip to publishers: if you do POD through Lulu or just about any other service, it's a good idea to not go with severely dark covers, because they'll darken up more in the printing process and look muddier than you'd like. The S&W White Box image is much lighter to begin with, so it probably turns out crisper.) Otherwise, the physical quality is very good, as I've come to expect from Lulu.

What's more, I've been enjoying Knockspell immensely. I've only finished issue #2, and already I consider the $5/issue that I dropped on the PDFs to be money well spent. "Isles on an Emerald Sea #2" is terrific. The Isle of Barzon has more old-school flavor than most of the "this here is old-school" settings I've seen. It could have been lifted directly out of one of Lin Carter's Thongor the Barbarian novels or one of Howard's lesser known, non-Conan tales. I'd have paid $5 for that one article. The rest of the issue is gravy.

Despite the fact that I seldom buy physical books anymore, my OSR bookshelf is getting crowded. Swords & Wizardry joins Labyrinth Lord, Adventurer Conqueror King System, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, and Mutant Future, along with an assortment of adventures (Barrowmaze I and II, Stonehell Dungeon) and supplements (Realms of Crawling Chaos, the LL Advanced Edition Companion, The Majestic Wilderlands). Most of these I got for free -- one of the perks of working in the industry. That by no means cheapens them in my estimation. If anything, I value books and games I was sent for review, or as an entrant in the Three Castles Award, or simply as a thank-you, higher than the things I buy for myself.

In the '70s, we mixed OD&D, Holmes, AD&D, and variants from The Dragon, Judge's Guild, Balboa, ourselves, and God-only-knows who else, and somehow made it all work. When it comes to old-school roleplaying, I default to D&D B/X, mainly because it's my favorite edition and I still have the books in good shape. But when you get right down to it, I really don't care whether I'm playing D&D B/X, OD&D, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, Basic Fantasy RPG, Searchers of the Unknown, Castles & Crusades, ACKs, DCC, or something else. In the final analysis, they're all basically the same; they're all basically D&D, and that's what I come to the table for.