An Update - Still Alive!

Looking around, I couldn't find where this comes
from. I like it, but if the owner wants me to
take it down, just let me know.

Wow, has it really been nearly a year? Last year wasn't much fun for me. Whatever, on to the post.

I'm not quite ready to be back fully yet, but I am around. I'm occasionally posting on the Traveller groups on G+, some stuff on Facebook, and occasional other groups. I do intend to return to the blog.

I'm still working on a MegaTraveller retroclone, based on the Mongoose OGL and incorporating elements of other editions. After discussions online and thinking about it, I want to really get back to the sandbox tools of CT LBB77, but with the rules influenced by some of the MT developments. One thing that I've learned about spaceships is that reaction drives are subject to the square-cube law, since thrust increases by the square while mass increases by the cube, speaking roughly. Building that into the ship design sequence should push designs toward smaller ships. I've been thinking about some other things, too.

I'm pretty certain that I am going to continue writing up the project I gave the working title "Flanaess Sector" as an AD&D 1E/OSRIC product. I'll import some of the alternatives to Illithids and other Product Identity races from sources like Adventures Dark and Deep, but otherwise it's mainly writing up tech items, a spaceship construction and combat system, and star system details. I am also trying to decide if it should be more science fantasy like Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, or White Star, or harder SF on the order of Traveller or even Orion's Arm. Maybe somewhere in the middle.

For fantasy gaming, I have changed my default setting a bit to include ideas from a guy named Scott, who was known for his settings such as the World of Thool but has since vanished from the internet as far as I can tell. He worked for a bit on a setting he called "Mandragora: The Mandrake March". It was to be based on Andrew Lang's Color Fairy Books (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on), taking elements from the stories and placing them into an otherwise normal D&D-type game. I want to do that, except that I'll include one area which is based on those (removing the Arabian and Chinese ones), an area similarly based on Irish, Welsh, and Breton fairy stories plus some Arthuriana, and an area based on the Arabian Nights Entertainments (plus the other stories traditionally associated with them, such as Sindbad, 'Ala ad-Din, and 'Ali Baba, and a similar manuscript called "Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange"). I'll probably have a land further to the East which is based on Chinese fairy tales (and an island nation drawing on Japanese fairy stories), but that's not the default starting area so I won't bother with it until needed. Some of the setting elements that I had originally developed will remain, such as the dragon-riding peoples of the Northern dales, the bull-riding nomad barbarians, the Southern cities of the sorcerer-kings, the iron-age Aztec island kingdom across the ocean to the West, the pirate princes in a "Pirates of the Caribbean" mode, and the fantasy Egypt-like river kingdom.

I've still been working off and on toward a fantasy setting which draws inspiration from the Wild West instead of Medieval Europe. I've been playing around with ways to approach the rather subtle magic I want, and GURPS remains the best source to do those things. I have considered changing the Swords & Wizardry: White Box rules, especially the spell list, to handle the setting. It certainly helps that it is available in .rtf format to make building a rule set possible. I might put it together as a Lulu project, if I go that way. New classes (Gunslinger! Snake Oil Salesman/Mountebank! Cunning Folk! Preacher! probably more!), new spell list, and so on, all in support of the setting assumptions. The setting itself is also slow going, since I want to create certain effects but I also don't want to be too close to actual history. Plus, I'm trying to figure the best way to have a Wild West with less Eastern Cities, and still waffling on the matter of trains (trains are a major element of Western stories, but they also bring Civilization far too quickly). I also really love pirates, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise comes close to overlapping with the Wild West - maybe they'll be in there somewhere, like a fantastic New Orleans. I haven't come to terms with the racial politics of the time relative to the setting either, so I am not sure how I want to handle the matters of Native Americans, Africans, and Chinese laborers.

Part of the reason that I haven't completed any of these things is that I still don't have a group to play them with. I still prefer face-to-face gaming, but my attempts to reconnect with the people I gamed with when I lived in this city years ago are running into the problem that a lot of people aren't really willing to change their lives to fit the time for gaming. Oh, I'm probably overstating matters. I'm just frustrated about still not being able to get a group together after such a long, long time. It almost makes me willing to spend time learning how to use Roll20.

How are you doing?

Aliens In Spectacular Science Stories/Rockets & Rayguns

Yeah, I am still thinking about which name to use. I think that, at least, SSS will be the working title.

Anyway, aliens. Since the game draws on a wide range of sources for its inspiration (I'll do an "Appendix N" post soon), it also draws on a wide array of types of alien races. On the one hand, humanoids, even ones that can intermarry with Humans, should be really common. On the other hand, some of the aliens in the source material get really weird and "out there". A really common trope is the alien race that is a lot like our stories of spirits and demons, being non-physical and capable of manipulating the physical universe in various ways. The original Star Trek series was particularly good for providing visual examples of these, but they were common throughout the history of the pulp raygun fantasy stories.

I'd talked earlier about the idea of the Flanaess Sector, but that was originally targeted at a more "hard" SF setting, where what we know of physics was important. That isn't a concern in raygun fantasy, so I've been looking at other monsters to include as aliens. I probably still won't include elves, since that would make things look a little too much like 40K for comfort!

I'm particularly interested in some of the more obscure entries to be found in the OSR, actually. The Kzaddich and Tsalakian (pdf), originally found in Footprints magazine (and John Turcotte's dreams prior to that), were put into the OGL when they were added to the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book. I think that they would be perfect for raygun fantasy. In the Adventures Dark & Deep Bestiary, Joseph Bloch provides an interesting creature called the "Genius Loci", which resembles a number of creatures from the original Star Trek, from various adventures of Northwest Smith, and so on. Mr. Bloch helpfully included that entry under the OGL.

I mentioned a number of creatures that fit in the Flanaess Sector article, such as the Flumph, Grell, Otyugh (or Neo-Otyugh), Myconids, Ropers, and so on. I think that I can replace the Mind Flayers with the Thelidu (they fit into the idea of raygun fantasy a little better anyway, since they were specifically developed for a science-fantasy influenced setting, Dwimmermount), which were included in the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book by James Maliszewski. The Umber Hulks who attend on Neogi could be replaced by Joseph Bloch's Underground Goliath.

All of that aside, it should be pointed out that nearly anything that fits into a fantasy world will also fit into raygun fantasy worlds. Notably, some of the horrors in Rafael Chandler's Teratic Tome are extremely appropriate to the sorts of pulp SF that falls into the raygun fantasy category.

I should write a manifesto, of sorts, of raygun fantasy.

The main thing that I'll need to do is work out which aliens are most common and have star empires of their own. I already know that I want the Thelidu to have one, with a sector of Ropers resisting them, and I certainly want an empire of Myconids (or maybe Skathros's Mushroom-men).

In the end, though, all of that is pretty much background to the central theme of the game, which I will talk about next time.

Edit 4/26: I didn't get around to talking about that central theme in the next post, but I will. I started to approach the discussion a couple of posts later, when I began to lay out what, exactly, I mean when I say "raygun fantasy".

Flanaess Sector

One of the campaigns that runs around in my head, that I'd like to run or better still play in, is what I tentatively call "Flanaess Sector". This is AD&D as a science fiction/science fantasy setting, though running it as a nearly hard-SF game (as "hard" as Traveller, say) could be very interesting indeed. Psionics and the Psionicist replace magic, technology is used instead of magic items, and the alien races are drawn from the more outré AD&D monsters. What it would need is a collection of new character classes, new technological items, starship rules, and perhaps trade and commerce rules (to handle Traveller style merchant campaigns, which are wonderfully flexible).

The aliens are mainly what I've given my thought to, little though it has been so far. I imagine an empire of Illithids, Ropers (which I imagine as being the first race that the Illithids were parasitic upon, drawing on the Urophion from The Illithiad) in a small sphere of resistance to the Illithids, Grell (in the Colonial Grell variety from Spelljammer), Neo-Otyugh, Neogi from Spelljammer with their Umber Hulk servants, maybe Xorn treated as a silicon-based life form, Flumphs, Ixitxachitl (suitably modified to not be based around Clerics, though they would make a great evil theocracy), Aboleths, and maybe a few others. I also greatly enjoy the Tyranids from Warhammer 40,000, so maybe those too. I don't have much love for humanoid aliens, but who knows? Maybe there are orcs or tabaxi among the stars.

The character classes might be based on the ones in Stars Without Number or maybe even Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition, but rewritten to fit better with AD&D rather than B/X. Or, more likely, a set of interesting classes could be written from nearly whole cloth. I envision, in addition to the Psionicist I mentioned, Soldier, Pilot, Engineer (or Technician), maybe Merchant, Conman, and a few others. It being AD&D, there would be room for quite a few character class options. The classes in the old WotC Star Wars game might not be a bad set of choices.

Starships could be handled with any of a variety of systems. The aforementioned Starships & Spacemen and Stars Without Number are the obvious choices, but Terminal Space or some other OD&D-based SF supplement would be workable, as well. For that matter, Traveller's starships would work well, too. As an alternative, perhaps a system of Gates, similar to the ones in the Judges' Guild "Portals" trilogy, could connect the worlds. Perhaps not, though, as starships are half the reason to play SF instead of fantasy.

Here's a list of all the intelligent monsters from AD&D that I think would make good aliens: Aboleths, Beholders (but I don't want to use them, although there is a whole society built around them, especially in Spelljammer), Dopplegangers, Dragons (maybe, but if so, then especially the Blue or Black varieties), Flumphs, Formians (centaur-ants), Galeb Duhr (maybe, they're perhaps a little "magicky"), Grell (Colonial), Intellect Devourers, Ixitxachitl, Lizard Men, Mind Flayers, Myconids (there's also an ecology of mobile fungi for their homeworld, not to mention the special molds and slimes could be from their native environment, too), Neo-Otyughs, Ropers, Thri-kreen (mantis warriors), Treants (should they keep their ability to animate trees? I don't know; probably not, which is also a way to "fix" Galeb Duhr), Umber Hulks, and Xorn. Mi-go (if the DM has the first print Deities and Demigods) would fit perfectly into the setting.

As I said, I would prefer not using any humanoids (other than Lizard Men, Dopplegangers, and Myconids, perhaps), but if I did I would stick to the less common ones like Crabmen, Aarakocra (bird-men), Tabaxi (cat-men), Banderlogs, Grippli, and the like. Xill could be interesting, though they should probably have their ethereal powers and nature removed.

It might be interesting to include a "transcended" species that manifests as the faery creatures like Sprites, Pixies, and the like (there's a useful "ruling caste" for them to be found in Adventures Dark and Deep called Faeries). There's a race like that in the Star Fleet Universe, in the Omega Octant, called the Loriyill. Their starships have semi-magical effects like space fireballs and such.

Anyway, it seems like it could be a lot of fun, and leveraging the more science fiction/science fantasy elements of D&D seems like a good idea to me.

Things I Know About The Middle Sea World 5

A portion of the hilly country along the coast north of the Long Sea is known as Cuniculashire. It is the home country of the Bunrabs, who are rabbit-like humanoids. They have characteristics very similar to those of halflings in other worlds, including the love of eating, living in underground warrens, and so on, combined with certain characteristics similar to those of gnomes in other worlds. They are a bit more gregarious than typical halflings, though, usually living in larger, communal warrens dug into the hills rather than individual burrows. Bunrabs have two special character types not found elsewhere: the Seers and the Healers. These will probably have character classes of their own (Seers may just be another name for Savants, found in Adventures Dark and Deep and A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore, possibly modified slightly for the Bunrabs). In addition, there are Bunrab Illusionists, similar to the gnomish variety. (For those curious, the Bunrabs are based on, but slightly changed from, the race found in Swordbearer.)

In the northern forests live a secretive race of beings known as the Uldra. These are not dissimilar to the gnomes of other worlds, but have many of their own characteristics. They are described in detail in Dragon magazine #119. Their cavalry ride reindeer.

Elves of the Middle Sea world either live mostly solitary lives (or in very small groups), or else a nomadic existence similar to Romanies in our world. The main exceptions to this are the three Faerie Courts.

Half-elves are pretty much what it says on the package.

Dwarves of the Middle Sea world are sometimes called "Machine Elves". They delve deep into the mountains, and say that they have a vast underground kingdom, where dwarves tend the World Machine. Perhaps this is true, but no one else has ever seen this World Machine, and the dwarves are not very forthcoming about what, exactly, it does. It doesn't help that all dwarves on the surface are self-admitted "deviants". No one, except possibly the dwarves themselves, is quite sure what that means, and the dwarves get quiet when pressed on that point.

"Half-Orcs" represent the more human-like ape-men. They cannot actually interbreed with humans.

There are no gnomes or halflings in the Middle Sea world, but see Bunrabs and Uldra above. Also, none of the various subraces of elves or dwarves exist, at least as player types.

There is a single kingdom, located on the eastern side of the mountains, that knows the secrets of building airships. These ships are expensive, though, and so there are not many of them. There are two sorts, airships with aerial sails, and airships with hand-cranked airscrews.

Sample airship, airscrew type: 40 turncranks, 1 captain-pilot, 1 pilot, 6 officers, 2 carpenters, 2 foremen (that is two shifts, allowing the vehicle to keep going 16 hours per day). Normal speed: 5mph (15"). Capable of bursts up to 20mph (60") for up to 15 melee rounds by tapping the flywheel, then requires 30 minutes at normal speed (or 15 minutes at a stop) to recharge 1 melee round worth of burst speed. Cargo, etc: 20 tons/40,000 pounds (can be used for artillery, troops, extra crew for artillerists and such, provisions, and so forth as well as cargo). Cost: 710,000gp (most of the cost is enchanting the hull so that it can levitate). The airship has 12-72 structure points. They normally mount several cannons on the upper deck, generally at least one facing in each of the four directions, that can be depressed or elevated to hit targets up to 45° off of horizontal.

I don't know what lies to the west, across the ocean. I've been looking to make some saltbox rules that would allow the players to discover that, if that's what they wanted to do.

I don't know what lies to the east, past the Wardoms of the Ablash Isle. Same situation.

The far south eventually leads to a realm of fire and volcanoes. The far north leads to an endless track of snowy wastes. Or so it is said.

For a while, I thought that the Middle Sea world was a small part of a giant ringworld or dyson sphere, but I now know that isn't the case (that would be a pretty neat environment, though; maybe someday, in another campaign).

I don't know who lives in the huge canyon just to the northwest of the sorcerer-kings' lands, but I do know that there is a trade route that passes through there and crosses the desert beyond. Are there bandit kings in that canyon? Possibly. I suspect, though, that it is mostly bands of ape-men.

In the sorcerer-king city-state of Morda, which I'd mentioned previously as being ruled by a necromancer-king, slavery is illegal. Such menial labor is performed by zombies and skeletons. Any slave entering the gates of Morda is immediately made a freeman on request and provided with a small stake to begin a new life. Slaveowners, of course, simply do not bring their slaves within the gates of Morda. However, the occasional escaped slave makes it to the gates and is granted asylum. It may be hazardous for such freed slaves to leave the Mordim lands, however.

Strange froglike beings known as Skwugs live in the marshes along the south edge of the Dead Lake (where the Kindred of Juiblex have their fortress). This is a colony of the main Skwug marshes along the edge of the Salt Sea in the Murai lands, however. How they crossed the desert, and how they maintain communication with their homeland (if they do), is unknown.

Updates

First, the sad news. I have decided to abandon my attempt to make a GURPS random-character generator, as it is simply too much work. Instead, I will go back to the Sixguns & Sorcery setting for the basis of my solo game. I still have work to do for that, but at least it is pretty clearly defined and doesn't involve massive feature creep.

For the Sixguns & Sorcery project, I need to develop the religion a bit more, enough to be able to stat out some of the spirit/gods and their possession effects, similar to the Loas in GURPS Voodoo. I'll talk about the religion another time. I've already converted the NPC templates from The Knuckleduster Cowtown Creator, which is a great wild west resource, but which was only statted out for Deadlands and D20 systems (and a nod toward FUDGE). Happily, there are available conversions for Deadlands to GURPS Deadlands in Dime Novel 1: Aces and Eights. Those are to 3E, of course, but converting from there to 4E is a snap. I did discover that the templates are pretty high-point valued if taken straight, so I tinkered with them to bring them down to power levels I think are appropriate to the basically gritty, yet still somewhat cinematic, nature of the genre as I envision it in the setting. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to see an NPC type called "Loafer" come in at over a hundred GURPS points, but I've chopped it back to 56. Still a fair amount, but it fits the character description. Many of the other NPCs similarly had to be cut back considerably from their raw converted state. I'll probably post them somewhere for others to make use of them. GURPS really needs more "generic" NPC statblocks for Referees to use, especially ones who are just getting their heads around the system. I hear experienced GURPS Referees say that they just set some numbers that look right, but it's getting to the point where the numbers that "look right" are also actually right that Referees need assistance with.

What else? I have returned to my AD&D 1E (mostly) sword & sorcery setting, Terra Ultima. I've made some decisions about it, definitely deciding, at last, to restrict players to human characters. I have, however, opened out the character classes somewhat, so that there are fifteen available options: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Illusionist, Magic-User, Monk, Mountebank, Outdoorsman, Paladin, Psionicist, Ranger, Spy, Thief, and Witch. The Bard and Mountebank are pretty much the versions from Adventures Dark & Deep, though I keep looking at the Bard material in Dragon 56 (the stat requirements of that version, though, make the Bard less common than the Monk). The Outdoorsman is a slightly modified version of the "Bandit" class from Dragon 63 (main change: HD are d8 rather than d8+1). The Psionicist is mainly the version by Arthur Collins in Dragon 78 (I changed the XP progression a lot and set the HD to d4 only). The Spy is a reskinned version of the Assassin. The Witch, right now, is mainly from the version in Dragon 114, but I am playing with ideas from Tim Brannan's The Witch. His class is pretty solidly written for D&D, though, so the AD&D-isms are coming from the Dragon magazine class. He does include an appendix on using the class in AD&D, so if I get around to picking it up in hardcopy before any witches show up in the game, maybe I'll use his version completely. That would change the demographics slightly (see below), but I can live with handwaving that, or changing just the stat requirements to the Dragon magazine version - if I get ambitious, and bored enough, I could always recalculate them.

I'm pretty interested in fantasy demographics and what they can do to flesh out a setting, so I worked out how frequent each of these classes are. My method was somewhat interesting, if I do say so myself, at least if mathematics and basic arithmetic don't scare you. I started by noting Gary Gygax's assumption that only one in a hundred people have the potential for having a class and level (DMG, p. 35). Then I went through each class and figured out what would be the chance of a character, rolling 3d6 in order, to qualify for it. Some of the classes are ridiculously difficult to qualify for under that default system. Even worse, there is a certain chance that a character will not qualify for any class at all (I called these "Hopeless characters" in my results). At the rate of one in a hundred having even a chance, for example, it turns out that only one in 250,000 people can become a Monk (and that is still only one in 2500 characters if you roll without any of the gimmick methods), which is rarer than Paladins (at one in 111,111).

My next step was to set a societal preference scale. That is, I set the priority of classes based on how important the class was to the society on the average. Lower-probability classes were typically set higher than the "usual suspects", and various assumptions were incorporated into the list. My list of preferred classes went like this: Paladin, Illusionist, Monk, Ranger, Outdoorsman, Fighter, Bard, Mountebank, Thief, Spy, Psionicist, Druid, Witch, Cleric, Magic-User. My assumptions were that it is very difficult to become a magic-using class even for those qualified, that people would typically prefer to be in a class that has wider abilities than more limited ones (such as preferring Rangers to Outdoorsmen), and that some orders actively seek out qualified applicants (notably Illusionists and Monks, who represent the more advanced priesthood of the Denialist Church, and Paladins, who represent the warrior-monk elite of the Radiant Church). I assumed that people would prefer to be a member of the various Cleric-like classes than to be a Magic-User, since the former have social and economic benefits that do not accrue to the latter. Finally, I assumed that people in the setting would prefer honest occupations to dishonest ones. Placing the Psionicist and Bard where I did are more intuitive, and I can't tell you why they are at those particular places in the preferences.

For each stage of preference, I figured out the percentage of the population would qualify, multiplied that by the percentage that remained and recorded the result. Then I subtracted that percentage from the total percentage (so that, for example, if 5% could qualify for a class out of a remaining 20% of the population at that stage in the preferences, 0.2 x 0.05 = 0.01 of the total population would be recorded, and that 1% subtracted from the running total of 20%, leaving 19% for the next stage in the preferences). Rounding all of the values to the nearest 0.0001 (0.01%) gave me the following table to roll d10,000 (which I will mainly use to replace the table on p. 35 of the DMG):

d10,000 (4d10) (only 1% of random NPCs even get to roll on this table)

0001-0088: Bard (1/11,364)
0089-0747: Cleric (1/1517)
0748-0779: Druid (1/31,250)
0780-6433: Fighter (1/177)
6434-6468: Illusionist (1/28,571)
6469-6723: Magic-User (1/3922)
6724-6727: Monk (1/250,000)
6728-7323: Mountebank (1/1678)
7324-7561: Outdoorsman (1/4202)
7562-7570: Paladin (1/111,111)
7571-7615: Psionicist (1/22,222)
7616-7631: Ranger (1/62,500)
7632-7714: Spy (1/12,048)
7715-9773: Thief (1/486)
9774-9838: Witch (1/15,385)
9839-0000: Hopeless Character, no class/level

The fractions after each class represent how many of that class there are per how many total population. I may come up with a class for characters who don't qualify for any other class, so I have something I can do with the Hopeless Characters.

For reference, here are the stat requirements for each of the fifteen classes:

Bard: S6 I6 W6 D14 C6 Ch14
Cleric: S6 I6 W9 D3 C6 Ch6
Druid: S6 I6 W12 D6 C6 Ch15
Fighter: S9 I3 W6 D6 C7 Ch6
Illusionist: S6 I15 W6 D16 C3 Ch6
Magic-User: S3 I9 W6 D6 C6 Ch6
Monk: S15 I6 W15 D15 C11 Ch6
Mountebank: S6 I10 W6 D9 C6 Ch12
Outdoorsman: S12 I10 W6 D12 C12 Ch6
Paladin: S12 I9 W13 D6 C9 Ch17
Psionicist: S3 I10* W10* D3 C9 Ch10* (*one of these must be 16)
Ranger: S13 I13 W14 D6 C14 Ch6
Spy: S12 I11 W6 D12 C6 Ch3
Thief: S6 I6 W3 D9 C6 Ch6
Witch: S6 I13 W13 D6 C6 Ch6

(Note that the Psionicist breaks the rule about Strength below 6 being limited to Magic-User and Dexterity below 6 to Cleric. This is deliberate.)

Finally, I've returned to working on the Top Secret retroclone game that I had set aside for too many months. No idea what I'm going to call it. I'll probably figure it out when it is closer to being complete. I have decided to incorporate some of the better ideas from Dragon magazine into it, such as rules for car chases and a better Contact (NPC reactions) system.

Top 10 Gaming Products

Over at Dyvers's blog, he's asking for lists of our Top 10 favorite gaming items of all time. To simplify things, I limited this to RPG items for my list. Anyway, here goes…

10) The Arcanum, Second Edition.

This is probably the best Old School set of published variant rules for D&D. It is well thought-out, addresses many of the problems perceived in D&D at the time, and keeps the things that make the game simple and quick, such as character classes and advancement through collecting treasure and defeating foes. It does include options for the more problematic things that would later get incorporated, such as experience bonuses for "role-playing" (without bothering to define that), but not many. Finally, it includes a simple skill system, armor that reduces damage, spells that aren't forgotten (but are limited in number of castings per magic user per day), and other simple, obvious fixes that would eventually become nearly standard in gaming. Ahead of its time, while still retaining the best of the origins, this remains one of the best rules systems in general.

9) This entry has been removed. I cannot continue to support the game that was listed.

8) Lords of Creation.

Tom Moldvay was given free rein when Avalon Hill was making a desperate attempt to remain relevant in a market increasingly moving toward roleplaying games, and he came up with this. In what may be the most gonzo setting ever, the whole of reality and alternate realities is opened up to play. The player-characters are given maximum freedom for advancement, hoping to eventually be able to achieve the status of Lord of Creation and create their own settings, alternate worlds, and so on. Along the way, they might learn magical powers, acquire cybernetic enhancements, fight dragons or robot soldiers, even travel into the poetry of William Blake. Seriously, one of the alternate world settings is derived from the poetry of William Blake. There is nothing cooler than that in gaming. Since the very next session could take players into the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology, an alternate world where Boudicca was not defeated by the Romans, or a crystal forest hiding crustaceous humanoids guarding a staff of power, the game was wide open for anything, and was able to handle it with cleverly designed (though, to be fair, occasionally difficult to understand) rules systems that still felt a lot like D&D.

7) Adventures Dark and Deep Bestiary.

There have been a lot of monster books over the years. None of them has been as good as this one, which includes every creature from the AD&D monster books (less, of course, the ones that WotC has reserved for itself as "product identity" - though those have been replaced by versions created to be effectively the same but with different names and physical descriptions, as many people have been doing). Mr. Bloch did not stop there, though, creating a whole batch of creatures of his own design to add in. Among them are the Faeries and their Sidhe Courts, which are some of the best things to come out of the OSR movement (which is not to take anything away from the many, many wonderful things which that movement has produced). I love this monster book more than most, and of course it is easily used with any compatible game.

6) World of Greyhawk Boxed Set.

What can I say about this that hasn't already been said? It is exactly what (A)D&D needed in a setting, with an interesting balance between the idea that would later become known as "Points of Light" and the clash of Kingdoms that drives medieval wargaming. As people have looked at this over the years, the cleverness built in has only become more apparent, adding pathos to the unfortunate direction taken by subsequent products in the line. Including everything from amazingly euphonious, yet still absurd and camp, names to interesting factions and organizations, there is more implied adventure in any one area of the setting map than some settings have in their entire worlds. Topped off by that amazing Darlene map and some really helpful random encounter tables, there is little else that a DM would need to run a wide-ranging campaign for years.

5) Pagan Shore.

I love Pendragon. It is among the best roleplaying games, and one that I wish I were able to play more often. I'm personally most fond of the Fourth Edition rules, but I'm not a fanatic about any of the editions. Whatever, though, the one book in that game line that rises above anything else is this one. Giving a description of a society that is as alien to most modern-day gamers as the Aztecs, but doing so by building the cultural differences into the rules, players will soon find themselves approaching the mindset of the Iron Age Irish. There are a few quibbles to be had, but almost all of those have been addressed by people online, such as a discussion of how to incorporate the actual legal systems of Iron Age Ireland into the game in a way that is neither intrusive nor overwhelming of the adventure parts. It really does work, too. It doesn't hurt that I have a deep and abiding love of the Irish culture and very often want to play a character from whatever the closest analog is in the game world.

4) Flashing Blades.

Despite being one of the most popular settings for adventure fiction throughout the years, the 17th century has seen remarkably little treatment in roleplaying games. One of the earlier (but not the earliest, by any means) games to address that period was Flashing Blades. Marrying a relatively simple game system to a detailed and deep social climbing system, the game calls forth the ambitious swashbucklers and supports that style of play with rules that encourage such behavior without privileging "story" over game play. I'm fairly certain that the only reason this didn't do better than it did is that it didn't have a magic system. Of course, there is little way to include such a thing into a game of this subject, so that is not surprising at all. That said, it might have done it well if the next product on my list had come out a little earlier.

3) GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War.

This was a game I didn't know I needed until after I got it. At the time, I was simply addicted to GURPS, so I was picking up just about everything that came out. When I got a look at the magic system, though… Look, up until I saw this, I was of the opinion that the RuneQuest magic system was the best one around - and don't get me wrong, it is excellent in many ways that have still not been matched by most games - and the one in Fantasy Wargaming was a glance at what might have been possible had it undergone more development. This one, though, hit every button of what I wanted in a magic system. Mages are not walking artillery pieces, they are subtle (except for the ones who aren't). Magic isn't just wave-wave-BOOM, but a process of conjuring spirits in smoky temples that are kept in the back rooms of Curandera shops and sending them out to do one's bidding. Yet, it still makes this all a part of an adventure game. Some magicians are Spirit Warriors, letting themselves be ridden by powerful Lwa who can do so much more than mere human beings can. The setting was, at the time, very nearly the only one on the market which dealt with race in the Americas in a relatively mature fashion, and was a surprise in that most, or even all, of the players' characters would be black.

2) AD&D 1E Dungeon Masters Guide.

Obviously this was going on my list somewhere. It has been, and rightly, lionized over and again, so I don't really feel the need to add to that general acclaim. Suffice it to say that there are few books out there which include as much useful advice, and none which include the density of advice and actually useful charts per page. Admittedly, one must get used to the writing style, which has been described as "High Gygaxian", but for myself I grew up on it and miss that idiosyncratic voice in gaming. Even if D&D isn't your game, you will almost surely find something of value in here, even if it's just to learn that there is a difference between jasper and onyx or discovering a passel of different terms for "prostitute". This is one of the most recommended books in gaming history, and it is for good reason.

and coming to the pinnacle, what could be better than the DMG?

1) MegaTraveller Boxed Set.

OK, I know that it is rife with typographical errors, mistakes, and other problems that gave this game the nickname "MegaErrata". Still, the first game I chose myself was Traveller, seeing that little black box in the bookstore that served as my first dealer of gaming products, and finding out that it had a book all about starships. Now, all these years later, having played or learned seven (or more, depending on how one counts it) different editions, I have come to the conclusion that this is the edition that did everything closest to right. It retains the flavor of the original game, while still fixing the problems inherent in the original design. It is compatible enough to use the supplementary material for the classic game, but can also make use of a great deal of the material written for T4 or T5 with only minimal conversion, and material for TNE with a little (a lot, actually) more work. Outside of the errata problem, the only disappointment about this game is that it was cut short before being finished, due largely to whatever happened with Digest Group - for example, only two of the alien races (plus two extra human cultures beyond the default one) of the default setting were ever converted to its specifications. The only edition which came as close as this one to perfection has been the Mongoose edition, but I have my own problems with that one.

Adventures Dark and Deep

I wrote the basics of this review as a comment over at Mr. Bloch's excellent blog, but I figured that I'd bring it here and expand on it. You can go to his blog for a link to purchase the book.

The idea of Adventures Dark and Deep is a speculative one. If Gary Gygax had not been forced out of TSR and had been allowed to develop AD&D in the ways that he wanted, what would the game's second edition have looked like? To build this, Mr. Bloch researched every word that Gary ever wrote on the subject, and compared those to work that he did in later games such as Dangerous Journeys: Mythus or Lejendary Adventures. Of course it is not exactly what Gary would have written, but it does look a lot like what he was moving toward.

I support this idea enough to have funded it through Kickstarter, at a level that would get me the hardcover of the Players Manual (there will be two more volumes, one for Gamemasters and one with monster descriptions; this is obviously the basic format of every edition of AD&D, as well as the WotC editions of D&D). My hardcover showed up on Saturday, and I am very pleased with the physical quality. It's not perfect (it uses, as usual for a POD product, glued rather than stitched signatures, for example), but it is at least as good as most products. The ink is clear and doesn't smear, the paper is smooth and has a good feel, and so on.

The text, as well, is high-quality (even if it does retain some things from Unearthed Arcana that I would have liked to see developed further - notably, the Chromatic Orb spell, which has always just been removed from my games), and I am very, very pleased with the work that Mr. Bloch did on this. I am considering using this ruleset in place of 1E in the future. I am especially happy that he chose to include the weapon vs. armor type table, even if he did relegate it to an appendix as an optional rule. On the other hand, he also rationalized it by separating the armor types from armor classes.

For those considering it, if the idea strikes you as a good one, then the product is well worth the $30 price tag for the hardcover.

(I also received my copy of Traveller5 on Saturday, but that is over 600 pages, so it will be a little while before I can say anything about it. Finally, sorry about the radio silence for the last couple of weeks. I hope that will be over now.)