In Case You Forgot

The Operation Unfathomable Kickstarter is "go." Check it out and lend your support! The full list of stretch goals is now available.

Also, on an unrelated note, here's another one of my counter-factual covers, this one with art by Earl Norem:

Get Ready to Enter the Weird Underworld

My Hydra Cooperative partners and I are getting ready to launch a Kickstarter on Monday, October 10, for Operation Unfathomable by writer and artist Jason "Dungeon Dozen" Sholtis. Readers of this blog no doubt know Jason's work and many of you will have no doubt read (and hopefully played) the original version of "Operation Unfathomable" from Knockspell #5. I got to play the original version at NTrpgcon, and I can tell you this expanded version is more of what makes the original so cool: more semi-gonzo weirdness, more underground sandbox, and more art by Jason. Plus, layout by Jez Gordon.

But wait! There's more. Hydra got together with Jason and cooked up a number of cool stretch goals. I've been working with Jason getting the Kickstarter page together. The video alone is going to be worth a small pledge, trust me!

Look for it come Monday.

Monsters, Blood & Treasure

John M. Stater has released the monster manual for the second edition of his retroclonish Blood & Treasure (discussed, here). While the stat blocks are pretty universal, one might reasonably think if they already have the monster book for their clone of choice, why do they need another? Okay, the cover is awesome, but why else?

It is true that many of the monsters are the usual assortment of humanoids, dragons, demons, and devils, but there are a few SRD notables I haven't seen in any old school product before. There are some new creatures and interesting homages to non-SRD beasties, too, like the "we-don't-need-no-stinking-Modrons" Polyhedroids. All of these stat blocks and descriptions are old school short (I don't think there is a page with less than 2 monsters), it is much more lavishly illustrated than most basic, old school monster books in an array of styles from well-chosen public domain illustration to cartoony. The only downside is that audiences used to modern monster books pinups, these will seem small. All in all, these traits make it probably the most AD&D Monster Manual of monster books I have seen.

There are the usual encounter charts by terrain, plane, and level. There are quick rules for many monsters as PC races. The typical extras, in other words. There are also a handful of one page "mini-adventures," all short and flavorful. John is good at this sort of thing as his hexcrawls attest. I'm not the only one that thinks so.

If any of that sounds good to you, you should check it out. Certainly if you already have Blood & Treasure 2e, you'll want it.

Get Aboard the HMS Apollyon

Over at the Dungeon of Signs Gus L has released the Player Manual Part 1 Combat and Exploration for his HMS Apollyon game. Gus has really put some thought into what procedures aid and abet a good dungeoncrawl, and this manual is full of his thought and experimentation. Lots to steal. Check it out.

Blood & Treasure

John M. Stater of the Land of Nod blog has released the second edition of his retroclone adjacent (meaning it isn't actually a retroclone, but uses the OGL to approximate something resembling older D&D) rpg Blood & Treasure. Unlike genuine retroclones, B&T isn't about emulating an out of print game. It aims to wed the simpler rules and playstyle of historic editions with some of the options and flavor more familiar from modern games. It's a delicate balance to pull off, but John's efforts achieve this better than just about anybody.

John adds some interesting new stuff; he outlines the differences between this and the previous edition here. One of my favorite new details is thieves getting to assemble a crew for jobs at 6th level--though they may not be trustworthy. I also likes the simple variations he provides at the end of the description for every class so you can be a Jester instead of a Bard or a Ninja instead of a Monk.

The art in this edition is great, too. I mean, check out that cover! The interior is good, too, and in an array of styles in true old school fashion.

It's available now on drivethrurpg/rpgnow.

Discovering the Hill Cantons: Some Questions for Chris Kutalik

As any reader of my blog knows, setting creation is an interest of mine. With Misty Isles of the Eld out, it seemed like a good time to pique the brain of a consummate rpg world-builder, Chris Kutalik.

Some things you’ve said have given me the impression that the Hill Cantons evolved from earlier settings of yours or at least revisions of earlier setting ideas. Is that the case? What relationship does the current setting bare to the ur-Cantons?

I had played a couple months of 3.5 (my only exposure) in an Austin's friends immediately before launching the Hill Cantons in early 2009—but it was the first time that I had played a tabletop rpg after an almost 25-year break. I had fallen back into my first love, historical miniature wargaming, three years before (mostly for the zen of painting miniatures over frigid Detroit winters).

Starting to think about actually running a campaign just opened up the flood gates of my imagination, but the first rush of things was heavily influenced by the hobby-driven reading of periods I was painting armies for. The pike and shot era (16th-17th century) was pretty high on that list and it just clicked with my deep impressions of the whitewashed Slovak towns I lived in with their baroque chapels and museums to forgotten wars against the Turks. And my brain was on fire with Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy (With Fire and Sword, the Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe),  a series set in the anarchic steppe wilderness of the then immense Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I just knew that my game had to have broad-mustachioed, fierce (but noble) cossacks, feathered hussars and the great sweep of a vast, hotly-contested borderlands. That vision melded in my mind with my own personal obsession  with the heretic-driven battles and social upheaval of Bohemia of the Hussite Wars. So the ur-Cantons was something much more of a thinnly-skinned, mush up of a real world time and place—very much the setting of a historical wargamer in other words.

But a funny thing happened as I got closer to the game and had to design adventure sites.  I revisited on the fiction front old fantasy favorites like Jack Vance. Lyonesse in particular swept me away and the tone and flavor started seeping in. But even more so in the first year was the gonzo spirit of Holmes basic (my first brush with the game). So you had sleestaks sharing hill tops with wandering, puffy-shirted and slash-hosed landsknechts trading bits of repartee.

In other words all this shit got thrown into a stew that was still pretty distinct at first but increasingly just became its own thing with its own peculiar dynamics.

One thing I love about the published Cantons stuff is the mix of “serious” world-building, pulp fantasy color world-building, and some outright farce (much of which seems drawn from personal experience)? Is that all accidental or do you have a clear idea when you write something whether it feels like the Cantons or doesn’t?

Hmm that's a surprisingly difficult question. I think you hit some of the Big Three in the Hill Cantons, a mixture of: a. my love intellectual exploration of our pre-industrial world (so I will geek out reading an in-depth study of weird-seeming currencies like spiral snail shells and coral cones in Africa that gets translated into a whole giant snail hunting economy inside a ruined, time-shifted city); b.There is a layer of the Hill Cantons that is for sure accidental in that it evolves straight out of the unpredicatibility of play in a long campaign with beautifully anarchic players. So you have on-the-spot creation and co-creation that come straight out of the whimsy of the moment. Like when Cole (who plays the murderous clown Taurus) asked me in the middle of a session, “how do you have half orcs but no vanilla humanoids in your world?” Which led to a whole somewhat hilarious narrative between the two of us about how orc slave-lovers were a hotly-fought over population in the decadent Hyperborean civilization yadda yadda.

But most of it is not purely accidental, yet also not totally intentional in the strictest sense of the word. Mostly when I am writing or just ruminating on the setting there is a huge amount of free association involved and it's occasionally quirky ass stuff well out what I normally draw on when thinking about D&D and rpgs. So the usual wells are books or personal experiences.

The humor often comes out of the particular dry, pessimistic strain of  Czech humor with its two souls of low humor farce and absurd, subtle satire (put together in some of the Czech classics like Hasek's Good Corporal Svejk) and that's as much or more about my upbringing as its my reading. Like you can hear the dark humor of my dad channeled into a lot of those places in the Cantons.

I think it explains my attraction to Vance's picaresque writing and how his tone and thematic attention to the absurdity of human social and religious mores show up a lot in the world. (You know, when it's not just killing creatures and taking their shit in a dungeon.)

So you know the players run into a buzz-saw-wielding Human Resources bot repeating “downsizing” or hear rumors of the Isle of Bureaucrats and its troubles with the neighboring Isle of Cannibals. Or encountering (and freeing) the chained and dying Slavic Pagan god, Veles, under a lake near their holding.

Your players (at least on G+) have contributed elements to the Cantons that have appeared in publications? I would think there would have to be something a player has come up with at some point that just didn’t fit with your conception or you just didn’t like. Do you have a canonical Cantons in your read and another at the table (like Barker’s “real Tekumel”) or do you just let it go where it goes?

They have indeed, especially Fever-Dreaming Marlinko which has probably more than a healthy amount of easter eggs and campaign in-jokes. Co-creation has always been something I enjoy in the running of the campaign (you know like that half-orc joke above). I bent the stick back a bit in the published version of Misty Isles, a campaign area that the players have never actually reached. It's for the best perhaps as Marlinko did get some constructive criticism over the in-jokey Church of the Blood Jesus, a syncretistic marriage between the medieval church and local dionsyiac rites founded by a drunk Irish priest player-character. In retrospect I would have cut the entire section. It worked well enough an organic evolving humor bit in the campaign, but it's thematically jarring and perhaps borderline puerile in translation.

That last question is well-timed. I had the good fortune in playing in a Jakallan underworld game at North Texas RPG Con a few days ago with Victor Raymond, a former player in MAR Barker's Thursday Night group. Chatting with him the next day he relayed how often when Barker was asked if such and such NPC created by a EPT gamemaster would fit into his Tekumel, the professor would more often than not say something like “oh yes such and such, I know him well” and then launch into a long discursion about his or her personality and position in the empire. I love to death that embrace of others creativity alongside the absolute confidence, the real sense of weight and reality in your own mindspace world (also what a wonderful bit of showmanship, really).

I'm not there (yet at least). I will freely admit to spending stressful hours at work or late insomnia nights ruminating and day-dreaming about totally non-game related parts of the setting like what a typical day is like in the streets of Marlinko, but really it's much more of a place that evolves with the needs and events of the game. It's very much still just a place to sustain D&D like things in other words.

Well mostly.

Mystery Men! 2nd Edition

John M. Stater of the Land of Nod blog has just recently released the 2nd edition of his Mystery Men! superhero rpg. As readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of superhero stuff, and I've also noted before how Mr. Stater is one of the most prolific quality content generators in these parts, so this project was definitely in my wheelhouse.

D&D mechanic-based superheroes has never been my first go to, but John employs it to really good effect. It seems like it would be light and fast place to play, and without the fiddly bits that slow up character creation in something like Mutants & Masterminds. The graphic design and art both seem to support this sort of "open the book and go!" inviting feel.

John has also got support for the system over on his blog. Only one post for the latest version yet, but you can check out the likes of Crystar the Crystal Warrior for the first edition and a fembot from Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

Check that stuff out, then get over to rpgnow and get yourself a copy.

The Starrunner Kit

After an untended hiatus caused by internet-outage, I'm back with a copy of Mike Evans's The Starrunner Kit in my hand (figuratively, since it's digital) that got released last week. Mike is a friend, so I wouldn't call this an unbiased review, but I think Mike has done a bang up job.

The "kit" portion of the (so important it gets mentioned again in the subtitle) is the key. Everything that's in here fills in some little gap or another that may be present in the old school sci-fi game you're playing: mechs, or a hover-bike pilot or plant lifeform class. These are particularly aimed at White Star, broadening a bit its serial-numbers filed off Star Wars with stuff out of space opera seen in film, comics, and anime post-Star Wars.

There are a lot of gear and character options, but there are also goodies for the GM. In fact, the plethora of random tables are probably where The Starrunner Kit shines brightest and where it's most useful for those playing a fantasy game not derived from the D&D chassis. There are tables for random jobs, random events between adventures, random sights and sounds in the city, even a short random table of alien religions. All of these are easily usable in any space opera game and more importantly, they are a springboard to the imagination for creating your own setting specific ones. Looking through these I started getting a lot of ideas of things that could be used in Strange Stars--and that was without rolling any die!

If any of that sounds interesting to you, then you should definitely head over to rpgnow/drivethrurpg and check it out!

Strange Stars W,X, and Y

Over at the Fate SF blog, John Till (author of Strange Stars Fate) is in the final lap of his "Strange Stars A-Z." This week, he's covered:

W for "Woon Academies"
X for the nongendered pronouns "Xe-Xem-Xir"
and Y for a "Yantran Holiday"

Check these out--and the older entries!

Grit & Vigor

I sometimes think John M, Stater is the hardest working man in DIY gaming (and that's saying something). He turns out game after solid game--not just adventures or settings but--games. And those are just the ones in print. His latest is Grit & Vigor, which is a pulp adventure adaptation of his Blood & Treasure (read Chris's review here) which is either a distillation of 3e-ish D&D to an old school level of complexity or a rebuild of old school D&D with some modern features, depending on how you look it at.

Unlike post pulp games which plant their flag squarely in the Depression era 1930s, Grit & Vigor seems a bit more informed by the early pulp and the end dime novel era that prefigured it: something like 1890-1920s. This is not to same G&V doesn't cover the classic pulp era--it does--but most of its illustration and sample NPCs harken this this early era. (For a good retrospective of the pulps of this time, you could do worse--and likely no better--than Robert Sampson's multi-volume Yesterday's Heroes.) Stater mentions expanses later covering some of periods the stories in those pulps take place including the Golden Age of Piracy and the Furture--and given his track record, I expect he'll deliver.

All the usual bases of classes are cover for the era, though magical (or occult ones) are left to an appendix so you can tailor the level of fantastic you want in your game. Feats providing for the larger than life nature of the pulp heroes are likewise a part of the game. There's even a section on Wonder Dogs! NPCs include Nellie Bly, Sherlock Holmes, Bertie Wooster, and Aleister Crowley.

So if pulp or adventure gaming interests you particularly with a familiar D&D-ish backbone, Grit & Vigor is well worth checking out.

Project(s) Update, Or I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends

Art by Jeff Call

I haven't done a general update in a while, so here's what Armchair Planet (i.e. me) has cooking with the Hydra Co-op:

• John Till's Strange Stars Fate pdf just got updated with some minor corrections. I am waiting to check the proof of the updates to the soft cover before releasing that.
• Work continues on Strange Stars OSR with several Hydra hands (heads?) pitching in to help: Chris Kutalik pitched in with Orbital Habitat Generation rules and Robert Parker is working on improving what I've done with hyperspace nodes. They're making me look like a slacker, but I'm working, I promise!
• Jason Sholtis is taking a break from work on his Operation Unfathomable to do a playtest of the mostly complete draft of the adventure Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak on Google+, and Jeff Call is hard at work on the art.
• Though Strange Stars is getting priority, I'm also working on The Cloud Castle of Azurth for which Joel Priddy is turning out some great interior art.

A lot of cool stuff to come in 2016.

Theriospheric Transfigurations

Erik Jensen has released his first compilation (don't let the "41" in the title fool you) of material from the Wampus Country setting. For the uninitiated, Wampus Country is an old school D&D setting that with an early American frontier veneer, and a somewhat humorous tone. It's sort of The Hobbit, if Bilbo were Davy Crockett and the dwarves were talking dogs in nice hats. Maybe.

Any way, Theriospheric Transfigurations is a collection of animal themed spells material (mostly spells) with a Wampus-y tone, but entirely usable in any old school setting. So long as its a setting where punny creations like a diseasel (a weasel that's a magical carrier of plagues) or the spell Fancify Rat (gives a rodent a snap set of clothes) might be appropriate. Which is to say: almost any, by my reckoning.

I've had the pleasure of playing in Erik's Wampus Country game and he's an inventive DM with a perfect ear for this sort of material. So head over to Rpgnow and pick it up. It's Pay What You Want, and well worth it!

John Till's Strange Stars

There's a proof copy of Strange Stars Fate. There are a few things we want to fix, so it's not ready for release yet, but it's getting close.

Friday on the Hydra Collective blog we'll feature an interview I did with John "Fate SF" Till, author of the Fate implementation of Strange Stars (available now in pdf). John had a lot of interesting things to say. Here's an excerpt:

You write a blog with SF in the title! What are some works/authors that you like?
I read a lot of SF on my own, and I am also part of the Second Foundation, a SF reading group in the Twin Cities that has been meeting for decades! This is an SF-rich community, with two world-class SF book stores just a few miles from my house. We read a lot in Minnesota, because of the long winters.

As a kid, my first SF books were:

• Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (my lifelong love of generation ships started here!)
• James Blish’s Spock Must Die. You can’t get any more Strange Stars than the sea of coffee produced by insane Organians!
• Samuel R. Delaney’s great space operas, Babel-17 and Nova. 
• John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy.
• The Ace Books translations of the Perry Rhodan space opera series. In fact, the first space empires that my friends and I created in the years right before roleplaying games were inspired by Rhodan. I am the very proud owner of TWO German books full of Perry Rhodan ship blueprints!

My big SF influences these days include Alastair Reynolds, the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, and the classic space opera of Cordwainer Smith. And of course, Eleanor Arnason, Minnesota’s best SF writer. Space opera fans should make a point of reading her Ring of Swords; fans of Niven’s Known Space stories should read her Tomb of the Fathers. I read ALL of Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality short stories and Norstrilia last year. I (re)read six Delaney novels over the summer!

Like I said, we read a lot in Minnesota.

A Special Snowflake Called Azurth

Art by Jeff Call

Humza K, author of the Legacy of Bieth and newest Hydra Cooperative member, has started a series of interview posts at the Hydra blog about "Special Snowflake" D&D settings. His interview with me regarding the Land of Azurth was the first published.

Go read it here.

Kickstart A World of Visceral Adventure

Looking for a good Kickstarter? Even if you're not, I've got one for you. Friend of the Sorcerer's Skull, Mike "Wrathofzombie" Evans brings you a detailed setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics: The World of Hubris. Mike calls it a "high-octane, meat-grinder, weird fantasy setting," and I'd say that's just about right. Want to see for yourself? Check out his blog and where it has been developing. You also see some great art the likes of David Lewis Johnson and Jason Sholtis have done for the setting. If you like what you see (and why wouldn't you?) throw some love the Kickstarter's way.

A Most Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet

Mateo Diaz Torres has released his hopefully first compilation of material related to his old school D&D campaign, Pernicious Albion: A Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet. Don't let the title fool you. The setting may be pernicious, but the pamphlet is like a rejuvenating tonic.

The setting itself is one of the most interesting ones to come out of the blogosphere in the past few years. In brief, it's author describes it as: "Austenian body horror fairy tale role-playing." To much of a tease? Well, perhaps this more expansive quote will elucidate: "It’s all insane angel conspiracies, occult aristocracy, revenant Romans, tennis with vampires, evil couture, Ars Goetia, royal spawning pits, realpolitik, light homoeroticism, and lakes of human teeth." Having had the pleasure of playing in Mat's game, I can personally attest to the vampires and tennis--and a lot of sort of "comedy of manners" interactions with frightening entities of great power, punctuated with discrete episodes of killing things and/or taking their stuff.

So the pamphlet: It's an introduction--just a taste to leave you wanting more, but in 17 pages it manages to convey a lot of the flavor of the setting. It's got two new old schoolish classes: the vampire and the warlock (a nice streamlining and refining of the 5e warlock), and has setting-based modifications of the cleric and magic-user. Three supernatural entities are detailed (patrons for warlocks or whoever) with there own goals and granted abilities. Then, there's armor, coinage, and languages: the mundanities or worldbuilding rendered interesting and evocative here.

As that description suggests, it's really a nice player's manual for the setting, which I suspect means the more expansive "GM's book" is to follow.

A Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet is available in pdf and hardcopy. Check out the ordering details here.

Metal Earth Has Got Maps for You

If you thought Aos had gone dark over at Metal Earth, you were wrong. He was just getting his second wind. Check out these maps from his last post:

This is my favorite but check out the others he's got over at his blog.

Forces are Joined

The Armchair Planet storefront on drivethrurpg and rpgnow are no more, but Armchair Planet lives on as an imprint in the Hydra Cooperative. Here's where you can find Weird Adventures, Strange Stars, and my upcoming projects. While I'm excited about the future or pooling capabilities and resources with the Hydra guys, there was a little sadness in giving up Armchair Planet's spot, still having everything under one umbrella is the best thing in the long run--synergy as the kids say, and all that.

So if you have a link on your site to one of my books, please update it, or let someone else know if you visit a page that does.

The Strange Stars game system books are the next things from Hydra from me. The Fate book is in the editing stage, so hopefully not too much longer, and the old school book is being written. Robert "The Savage World of Krul" Parker is lending me a hand on that one, which should speed up the process.

Hydra overall has a lot of cool stuff coming: Anthony's California Dunes (a weird, mythic California recasting of Slumbering Ursine Dunes), Chris unveils The Misty Isles with mo' Eld and mo' problems, Mike is working on the second edition of his Japanese-flavored old school Ruins & Ronin, and just over the horizon is Jason "Dungeon Dozen" Sholtis's weird underworld epic campaign setting Operation Unfathomable.

Marlinko Fever

Colorful, eccentric cities are a fantasy staple: Lankhmar, Viriconium, and New Crobuzon, are characters as distinct (or intriguingly ambiguous) as any humans in their respective stories, perhaps more so. While gaming has given us a lot of place names to hang our on imaginings on or perhaps tools to use to apply to creating these sorts of places, it has given us very few of actually places. (Modesty forbids me from mentioning the City of Weird Adventures. Wait. No it didn't.) Whatever size you think that pantheon is, you can now add Marlinko to it.

I'm listed in the credits of Chris Kutalik's Fever-Dreaming Marlinko in recognition of my haphazard punctuation hectoring of the product in its various stages, and I am a partner in the secretive Hydra Collective, so I'm biased--but also well-positioned to tell you what's good in this thing that was only meant to be a stretch goal for another product's Kickstarter and has now grown to comparable length and scope.

First off, Marlinko has the Slavic spice (They exist. Look it up!) flavoring the stew of Vance and Leiber and Chris's own fine sense of the absurd that informs the Hill Cantons setting in general. This isn't just Appendix N with a twist, though. Each of the contradas (quarters/neighborhoods) are detailed briefly enough so as not to wear out their welcome, but in-depth enough to make them seem like distinct places. Each has its own traditions, history, and possibly even deities, described in a manner I would call Glorantha for the old school oriented, meaning enough detail to show that genuine care was put into it, but enough humor to show no one is taking it too seriously--and always with an eye toward gameability.

Then, there are NPCs and locations. Rogues and scoundrels, all (or at least mostly)--some of whom seem like they have more story than what you are given. That's another important point, here: Marlinko is lived in. It didn't spring fully formed from Chris's brow, but rather it's been used and abused by the Nefarious Nine, the PCs of the ongoing Hill Cantons Google+ Experience.

The presentation of Marlinko puts it above some old school city books too (I know. Heresy!) Jeremy Duncan's and Jason Sholtis's work is put to perfect use with subjects ideal for their styles. Luka Rejec's maps make me feel like I need to throw money at him to get him to draw maps for some project of mine. I mean, look at this:

Then there are a lot of fun generators: news, tiger-wrestling, carousing. I'm not so big on those things, but they're fun to read. Some of them were polished or designed by Robert Parker, who is a man who I sometimes think believes the gaming is in the subgaming, so the love is there.

Anyway, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko is available where all fine Hydra products are sold.

NTRPGCon

I'm in Texas for the  North Texas Rpg Con once again, this time for a summit of the Hydra Publishing Collective as well as the usual gaming an debachery. I met up with the usual suspects last night: Chris Kutalik, Robert Parker, and Justin Davis, and met Mike Davison for the first time. I'm looking forward to meeting Jason Sholtis.

Oh, and I picked this up yesterday:

Some of us are in an indie publishing panel on Saturday morning which they closed registration up prematurely, so if you're at the con and can rouse yourself at 0800, you should come by regardless.