The RPG Folder Filled With Nothing But Love

Continuing this series of "reviews", as it were*.

The Kitten is a character class by Kirt Dankmyer - the dankest Kirt in the world - written for The Black Hack

I wanna play a kitten. Seriously. I only deal 1 lousy point of damage per hit, but I only TAKE 1 damage per hit from supernatural enemies. That's frickin' cool. Werewolf? I gets tossed about, lick myself, walk away.

And I can cast spells? Dawg**. That's cool as shit.

Of course my most important power is cuteness. If I'm being cute, I can do stuff maybe a little easier than otherwise. And that's true of kittens in real life, right? If they want the sandwich they can get the sandwich more easily by putting on a cute air.

Kittens rule.

The Blob is a one page game by Joaquin Ollo. It's a weird little thing and I kinda dig the idea.

You are a blob. Everyone else is an egregore, which I gather is a kind of "hivemind" or thought form. So basically you haven't been assigned a shape and you navigate this weird landscape of other players who kind of try to impose rules on you and the endgame is you have a shape of some kind.

Very strange and lovely. Cool cover art too.

The Purple Worm Graveyard by Tony Dowler is Labyrinth Lord adventure for character levels 1-3 with juicy art by Ed Heil. I love Ed's art so much!

The adventure is about a worm god cult. It includes some "moves" that I believe are based on or inspired by Dungeon World stuff. But I'm no expert on that game so I could be wrong.

One thing I love most about this little adventure is the last sentence of the final encounter area: The large gong summons a purple worm. Now... this is based on old school D&D. And it's a low level adventure. So if the PCs make it this far and actually summon a purple worm... well, you know what that means. TOTAL PARTY KILL.

Nice.

*It occurred to me just now that "as it were" is one of those phrases I sometimes use without knowing a damn thing about its origins. I'll look it up later.

**Why the hell did I say "dawg"?

That RPG Folder Over the Rainbow

Yet another post in this series, as I sort out my RPG folders, proper like.

Exodus System by Jacob D.C. Ross from Thunderegg Productions is a genre-neutral universal RPG loosely based on a D&D framework (6 abilities, class, level). The system also borrows from Savage Worlds (the abilities are rated by dice steps) and Cypher System (I'm not familiar enough with this to recognize the elements). I also noticed The Black Hack showing up via usage dice.

At a glance, I'm not into this at all. I typically don't enjoy universal RPG systems because it feels like when you try to please everyone you please no one. A lot of people disagree, which is evidenced by Savage Worlds' popularity. When I popped this open and just browsed it, I was turned off by a few things. One is that it's a generic system. Not my jam, but there's nothing at all wrong with that. This is just a preference.

Second thing is the layout. No one is credited with the work, which I think is a bad thing. Always credit your creators. Maybe Ross wrote the game and laid it out? Anyway, there's this HUGE border work that eats up about 40% of each page. That's kind of a lot. It includes chapter headings in big font, which is nice. But the main text is much smaller and confined to a rather small area of the page.

Third thing is the art and how it works with the layout. The art isn't bad, and some of it is really good. The cover isn't bad and there's a killer hawk man on page 5. The credits don't say which artist did which pic, not even the cover, so I don't know who to credit there. Some of the art just feels generic as hell*. And that's probably on purpose since this is a generic game. Some of the images are presented rather small on the page but they seem like they would work well if they were larger. I'm being super picky here, I know.

I haven't read the game. Just browsing how it works, there's some interesting ideas here. You "build your own class" by selecting a party role, combat role, and two flavors. So for example you may create a Face who is a Controller and also a Noble with Energy powers. This is kinda cool, but the language and arrangement is very D&D 4e and maybe World of Warcraft. It's the sort of vanilla treatment of high fantasy at the gaming table. I get it, it's fairly elegant, but it leaves me cold, personally.

This looks like a fairly complete little game and I bet you money it runs smoothly. So definitely check it out, even though I just can't get into it.

*I hate being critical of artists. These creators are good. This is a small, niche game in a small, niche market and they deserve respect and support. So please don't take my criticisms as me picking on them in any way. There isn't a single piece of art in this book that suggests a bad artist. It's just that not a lot of it jumped out at me, and some of that might come down to context. The huge border on each page is extremely sci-fi in an Alternity fashion, but a lot of the art is vanilla high fantasy and sometimes it's a little jarring seeing that juxtaposition. And this is coming from a guy who loves pre-80s fantasy that mixes lasers and unicorns without any concern for genre boundaries.

House of Dogs is a journal of RPG theory and practice. Which is lofty speak for "RPG zine about RPGs". Oddly, the first thing I noticed about this was how its table of contents looks like AD&D. The font is something like Futura and it has the gray bars like a DMG table. Nice touch.

The articles are cool. You got articles discussing Tomb of Horrors, Gardens of Ynn, Fuck For Satan, and more. I really loved David Shugars' discussion of Gardens of Ynn and its wonderful mechanic for travel.

Good read with some interesting art by Odysseus Jones and Evey Lockhart.

That Old RPG Folder You Were Afraid to Open

A continuation of this series right here.

Market Tables is written ostensibly for Knave, which is a cool and simple dungeon crawling game by Ben Milton. I found this one on the HD and have zero memory of picking it up. I'm sure it's a freebie download somewhere but I can't figure out who did it or where it lives. Basically this is a 3 page reference full of, well, market tables. Like, if you need an empty pot, some mediocre poison, or a whistle then this document hooks you up with prices and inventory slots. Cool. Useful.

Lost in the Wilderness is a random encounter table book for Neoclassical Geek Revival, an OSR-style RPG by Zzarchov Kowolski. It's kinda neat. It's artless and the font is too god damn small for my aging eyes, but it's still neat. You basically roll d8, d6, and d4 and the combination of results tells you what kind of encounter you're having, based on the terrain. For example, you are in a haunted forest and you roll 2, 4, and 1: dense trees wherein a witch is hiding near a weird shrine. Useful.

No Class Hack is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a hack of The Black Hack that removes classes and adds "Edges". I love this. If I run TBH this is what I'd prefer. It seems like a great tool to build a cool sword and sorcery game, for example. Also this book includes lots of cool modular rules.

Killer Clown

Here's a killer clown I did for Mike Evans' Barbarians of the Ruined Earth.

Weird Landscape for Barbarians of the Ruined Earth

Here's a bit of art I did for Mike Evans' Barbarians of the Ruined Earth. There's more to come. This book is gonna be stuffed with art! Not just mine, but lots of others such as Matt Hildebrand, David Lewis Johnson, Fred Dailey, Kelvin Green, and Matt Adams. Lovely stuff.

Barbarians of the Ruined Earth Alternate Cover

Here is my finished alternate cover for Mike Evans' Barbarians of the Ruined Earth (check out the Kickstarter).

I'm happy with this. I wanted a comic book vibe with action and spectacle and I think I pulled it off. I'm not sure why the giant robot is spitting liquid fire but I thought it was very metal so I kept it.

Ah, but what is this game you ask?

Barbarians of the Ruined Earth, from here on known as BotRE, is a post-apocaliptic sci-fantasy RPG in the spirit of Thundarr the Barbarian. So basically swords, sorcery, and super-science. It is based on The Black Hack by David Black, which is one of the best and most versatile old-school RPG engines around. If you have played D&D you will recognize many of the tropes of the game system, though it plays quite differently. For example, in BotRE and TBH the players do nearly all the dice rolling. The GM only rolls for things like random tables and whatever madness they have going on behind the screen. They GM doesn't touch dice otherwise. Let the players do the work.

So check it out.

Sketch for Barbarians of the Ruined Earth Cover

Work in progress... pretty metal?

Here's the Kickstarter!

Rub It Review: Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells

On my brief visit to Gateway Games in Cincinnati, I spied a copy of +Diogo Nogueira's Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells so I snatched it up. I had already picked up the PDF, but I had not really dived into the game. I didn't know much about it other than Diogo does wicked art.

A captive in the passenger seat on the drive home, I just started reading and was immediately impressed (while sunlight lasted, anyway). Spoiler alert: this is the best sword & sorcery RPG I have yet encountered. And I haven't even played it.

This is a digest sized 48 page RPG packed with great art and extremely focused, clear writing. I am a fan of games that can deliver their message in as few words as possible, like a good poet delivering the goods. Where I feel that some games do this a bit poorly is that they give you sparse text without enough visuals. The visuals are important, to me, to provide context. SS&SS gives you clear, simple writing plus a healthy heaping helping of art. The art, combined with the words, paints a picture of a world of heroic fantasy in the Conan and Lankhmar vein. Yummie.

Much like Lamentations of the Flame Princess' Rules and Magic book, this book dives right into the meat without any hesitation. We get 2 pages that explain fully how the game works, then we're into chargen with each of the three classes getting 1 page (with art). And that's all we need.

The game is OSR-friendly, but not a clone. Its attribute list includes 4 instead of the classic 6. Physique, Agility, Intellect, and Willpower are all you need in this game. It is a roll-under system that owes a lot of it's mechanics to The Black Hack. It has a clever set of rules for armor and shields wherein the damage die of the attacker is reduced based on your armor. The shield becomes an active tool rather than passive defense. Weapons are divided into size categories that determine their damage die. The encumbrance system is simply that you can carry as many items as you have Physique, which is a method I personally use so I'm happy to see it here.

The magic system is a Willpower test with a difficulty equal to the spell's power. There are 50 spells described in a few pages, and of course you can make up as many more as you like.

I am enchanted by this game. I grokked it immediately and devoured the book in one sitting, which is not something I usually do. Now, I am not necessarily a huge fan of actually using The Black Hack's system to create content or run games. This is NOT a ding against that game, nor this one. It's just that my personal play preference isn't aligned with roll-under as the primary mechanic. Like all RPG and OSR nerds, I'm stupidly picky and pedantic at times. But this game kicks too much ass for me not to use it at some point.

There's a lot more awesome to it, but you can go pick it up for yourself and see. Great game. Great presentation. Get it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/198163/Sharp-Swords--Sinister-Spells?src=hottest_filtered

(NOTE: Although I'm a fan of games that deliver the goods in few words, I would not argue that this is the "best" way. I would argue instead that each game deserves the verbiage that best serves the game and sometimes that means more text rather than less.)

Rub It Review: The Rad Hack

The Rad-Hack is a Black Hack hack by +Karl Stjernberg, whose killer maps are killer. Like most hacks, this hack is short, sweet, and straight to the point. You get pretty much the entire game system on one page and by the second page you're into character classes. Classes include human (wearing a bunny mask, lol), mutants, robots, and psionics.

It's a cool little 36 page book packed with flavor and badassery. I wanna be a mutated monkey with acid spit!

So the reason I wanted to call out this game is because Karl's work is just dripping with attitude. His style reminds me of many alternative comics icons such as Charles Burns (a little bit) and of the many counter culture or car culture/tattoo culture artists who draw wild shit all the time. I likey.

Favorite Rub: The Rad World map.

https://www.rpgnow.com/product/187874/The-RadHack

Black Pudding #4

Black Pudding #4 is alive! Get yours today.

This issue features a 15 page OSR style play book. These are more-or-less the rules I have adopted for my own game. They harken back to older versions of the game, such as B/X, riffing on Labyrinth Lord, The Black Hack, and Swords & Wizardry... but with some "modernisms" such as ascending armor class.

Oh, and new classes to boot. And tons of meatshield NPCs. Boom.