Wild Wild West Wednesday Reviews

Again, I'll mention that my friend Jim and I have embarked on a review of the tv series Wild Wild West to be published on Jim's blog Flashback Universe. As of today, there are 3 posts in the serious under this tag.

Wild Wild West Wednesday

My friend Jim and I have embarked on a review of the tv series Wild Wild West to be published on Jim's blog Flashback Universe. Head over there to check out the first installment.

Fourth World Apocrypha: Steve Gerber on Mister Miracle

As an addendum to last week's post, I found this great post on Diversions of the Groovy Kind that reproduces Gerber's and Golden's Mister Miracle #24.

Enter the Lumberlands!

Erik Jensen of the Wampus Country blog and related publications is Kickstarting a new zine in that setting called Lumberlands: 

"...spend some time in the misty Lumberlands, a vast expanse of enchanted forest where brawny lumberjacks ply their trade, seek adventure and fortune, and defend the frontier from horrible sasquatches."

I loved playing in Erik's Wampus Country game in the days of G+ and I'm pleased it's been resurrected in this zine. Check it out!

Down the Mean Streets of Neo-York

A gaming compatriot of mine has started up a new blog Neo-York Chronicles where he's detailing his vision of a cyberpunk future New York. It's good stuff. You should check it out and add it to your blog rolls!

The Rolling City and the Devil Sun

This post is in response to a challenge from Anne at DIY & Dragons based on this post a the Githyanki Diaspora from 2009 suggesting an easy way to "Make Your Own New Crobuzon."

The Last City
Clacking, rumbling, the city moves. It rolls through the night on sixteen indestructible rails carved from the bones of dead gods. The shanties on its ziggurat steps rattle; it's bristle of towers sways. The city never stops for long, and it always stays ahead of the dawn. It's being chased by a vengeful god, the Sun.

The Devil Sun
There is a face in the green Sun, and it looks down on the world it hates with grinning, idiot malice. It chases the city across the face of the blighted world, through the ruined cities of the elder days. Where its morning light shines, its energy creates cancer jungles and fleshy masses of monsters. Even these wither and die under the force of its noon regard, leaving only blasted desert in the dying light of evening. The Devil Sun would destroy the clanking redoubt of the city, too, but it moves too slowly across the sky to catch it. For now.

Three Minor Humanoid Races
Xixchil once had their own city, but it was lost, and they bought their passage on the last city with their art. It was the Xixchil surgeons that developed the Warforged. The Xixchil are mistrusted because they live in enclaves of their own and practice secret rituals they do not allow others to see.

The Warforged were made to be the city's soldiers. There are many fewer now than there once were. They are officially accorded respect for their service, but many former refugees blame them for the loss of their old homes.

Athasian aarakocra live in the precarious high towers of the city. They are scouts and foragers.

Three Monsters
Clockwork automata serve in every level of the city, particularly performing jobs around the engines or on the city's undercarriage where living things can't go. Some damaged automata become rampaging clockwork horrors.

Obliviax is cultivated in some labs in the city for it's various memory uses: to fashion an anti-senility drug, to steal memories, or simply to make people forget. It has escaped and grows wild in some lower levels.

Arcane oozes sometimes crawl up the cities exterior. The gorge themselves to a torpor on the divine magic that powers the city. Sometimes they become a hazard and must be removed.

Wednesday Comics: Cosmic Tales!

I'm proud to announce friend of FtSS Michael "Aos" Gibbons has released his long-anticipated space-faring superhero comic Cosmic Tales Quarterly, available in a limited print run.

It's 48 pages of story and 3 pin-ups in glorious black and white with a cover colored by yours truly. Head over to Michael's blog, The Metal Earth, to secure your copy while supplies last!

Well-Met in Umberwell

I reject the notion that there is one right way to do a setting book. Those making the argument in favor of a more terse or utilitarian style often point to the bloat found in setting books by the major publishers. While I won't deny there is often a verbiage problem with those books, I'd also suggest that they are an easy target for the people making these sorts of arguments, i.e. members of a community to some degree defined by its opposition or at least contrast to major publishers' ways. While I'm sure not everyone is a fan for a number of reasons, I've never seen anyone cite The Tekumel Sourcebook volumes or Glorantha books as examples of overwriting.

There are two thoughts I have about setting books that (I think) better get to the truth of the situation. The most obvious one first: People like or want different things. Some people want to be transported, others just want prompts or aids. The second thought is that settings should be written in such a way as to make the setting more interesting, realized, and playable. Any verbiage not to this end is excess, but also any brevity that undermines those elements counts as a deficit.

All that preamble to cite an example of something that does it right, the third of such supplements to hit the mark, as I see it, by Jack Shear: Umberwell: Blackened Be Thy Name. Umberwell is one of a handful of 19th Century-ish fantasy settings in terms of technology, though the vibe is a bit Elizabethan underworld, a bit Dickensian nightmare, and a whole lot New Weird. It is also, as are all of Jack's settings, eminently integrated in a D&D environment, embracing the whole Star Wars cantina array of races and classes. it does this all in 134 pages.

The city has a European feel. Its island arrangement recalls Venice, and its character recalls London (or versions of London like New Crobuzon). It might be a bit Weimar Berlin in its decadence. There are bits of New Crobuzon evident, certainly, a bit of Sharn perhaps, and I perhaps flatter myself that I see some glimmers of the City in a couple of places, but it is its own thing.

It succeeds where Eberron, to my mind, fails. Eberron's vague, 21st Century Americanness skims across the top but does not penetrate the weird and Medievalist elements. Eberron is to genuine pulp sensibility what a guy sporting a fedora in an Instagram pic is to Sam Spade. Umberwell feels authentic (for lack of a better word), but never in a way that sacrifices it's fundamental D&Dness.

It is not complete, in the sense that it does not try to give you the totality of a world, nor does it attempt to. If any given Forgotten Realms splat is like a history or geography book, and Weird Adventures a travel guide, Umberwell is like a travel essay or TV show. It is painted in impressionistic strokes and focuses its efforts on the things that directly confront its visitors (i.e. the players and DM), only filling in other details as needed to color and accentuate those.

And yes, I'm thanked in the book, so my review is assuredly unbiased, but if anything I've written sounds interesting to you, so should check it out, then tell me I'm wrong.

Return to Wermspittle

If you like early modern/modern fantasy cities like Jack Shear's Scarabae or Umberwell or the City of my Weird Adventures (if you recall back to 2012 and before), then you will want to check out Hereticwerk's Wermspittle. I did an introduction to that setting once upon a time. Go read it. We'll wait.

After a several year hiatus, new Wermspittle posts have begun to appear, including some actual play reports. Slowly, admittedly, but proof of life. Check it out.

Uncovering Krevborna

Krevborna: A Gothic Blood Opera is a system agnostic setting book released this week by Jack Shear of the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque blog. The world detailed is the sort of place Jack deals with in much of his rpg writing: an early modern setting with more than a hint of the Gothic.

Full disclosure before I delve into the review proper: I am listed in the credits of the book as I have been a player in Jack's online game (Tobias Rune, Scientific Occultist!), and Jack has done some editing for me on my stuff in the past. We have been blogosphere friends since long before that. My view, then, is perhaps biased.

Krevborna is 109 pages plus an index. In that space it vibrantly evokes a certain type of setting, and gives you locales, NPCs, organizations, and conflicts with which to populate it. It is fashionable in many circles to say setting books should always be short or deliver things very lightly. This is an understandable reaction given the bloat that has afflicted many a "major" rpg company setting book. My opinion is this: A setting book should have exactly as much verbiage as it needs to achieve its goal (and that goal should in part include usability). This will inevitably mean that no setting book is for everybody. some people will want the exotic cultural detail of the Empire of the Petal throne or Glorantha, and some want a setting heavy on new mechanical tidbits, but otherwise interchangeable with any number of faux-Medieval worlds. Having written a couple of setting books myself, I can say that there are always people that think you gave just the right amount of detail and then those who want more. (There are probably also those who think I wrote too much, but they don't send me emails.)

I don't think I'm off base when I say that Jack isn't concerned with you being able to replicate his Krevborna in  minute detail; he wants you to be able to create your own Gothic-tinged, dark fantasy setting that may happen to also be named Krevborna. He is light on many details, focusing his time on directly addressing theme, tone, and atmosphere, and how you leverage these things in a fantasy game as a DM. Jack is very good at delivering these elements flavorfully but briefly.  Maybe it's his college educator background, but he's able to bullet-point and not be at all dry!

I don't mean to suggest there is no setting detail, because there are plenty of Krevborna-specific information and tools, and plenty of stuff to help players get into the mood, too: sample names by region, appropriate backgrounds, tables of dark secrets, and NPCs to be patrons, acquaintances, or antagonists. The great supernatural powers are briefly described, allowing DM's and players to flesh out the details as they will.

The last section of the book is a brief summary of Jack's approach or "house rules" for running Krevborna in 5e. This is light enough that no OGL is required, but meaty enough that those versed in the 5e rules will know what he is doing. The strength of the system agnostic approach is this can be easily ported to old school simulacra or DungeonWorld or whatever.

In summary, I think this is a great setting, but also a great demonstration of a way to present a setting, and is well worth the price of purchase.

Strange Stars Reviews

I couple of Strange Stars reviews went up this week. One for the OSR Gamebook and the other for the sourcebook. Both of there are by that reviewing machine Endzeitgeist. Also, here's a review I recently discovered from back in 2015. Any news you haven't heard is still news!

5e Race Creation

I've posted this link before, but it just keeps getting better, so I thought it was time to remind everyone.  JamesMusicus has developed a formula for creating "balanced" 5e races and tested it through all the published races so far. He's also got a catalog of a bunch of new races he created.

Check out the other stuff on his blog here.

Mortzengersturm Reviews

A couple of reviews for Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak have come out, and they have not escaped the notice of the manticore wizard himself:

Jack Shear over at Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque
Gus L at Dungeon of Signs

Strange Stars Review Roundup

GusL over at the Dungeon of Signs wrote a thorough review of Strange Stars OSR yesterday that you should read if you haven't. You should also stay to check out Gus's blog because he does good stuff outside the bounds of bog standard Medieval fantasy.

I also ran across a couple of old reviews for Strange Stars that I hadn't seen before. They might be new to you, to:

Andy Slack's review at Halfway Station
A video review from Red Dice Diaries

You Fate guys need to to get the people some Strange Stars Fate reviews!

Banners & Logos

Sometimes it's a "good" distraction from getting the rpg writing I need to get done doing logos/headers/cover designs for other people. It's a different sort of work that doesn't feel like work at times.

I've been working on some banner's for my fellow Hydra member Humza K. He's got the first one I did up on his blog now. It is probably more Arabian Nights-y than ideal, but it looks nice. Here are two later options I did to be more adventure-y maybe:

A while back, my friend Tim Shorts asked me to take a crack and redoing his GM Games logo. A think after a couple of passes I came up with this, sort of riffing off what he had before. Yesterday, Tim got dice with that logo and they look great. It's satisfying to see a design I did show up on a physical object:

Games I've Played Recently

After something of a hiatus with gaming as a player, I 've been in two ongoing campaigns of late that I've really enjoyed. There are a lot of differences between them in terms of ruleset and campaign style, but a lot of similarities in terms of what I think are good GM practices, too.

Art by Guy Davis

Jack Shear's Krevborna is on a break now for the holidays but will hopefully return in the new year. Not surprisingly, it's sort of a Gothic setting (Ravenloft, but better realized, perhaps). We use 5e, and there was as much a focus on mystery and investigation of conspiracies as there was traditional exploration and monster-slaying.

Art by Jason Sholtis

Jason Sholtis's Bewilderlands, run in Swords & Wizardry, is perhaps a more "traditional" wilderness hexcrawl--if your definition of traditional isn't so much mainstream stuff, but the sort of weirdness produced by the OSR DIY crowd. There are mysterious things in the Bewilderlands, too, but the effect is more "what will we stumble into this time?" than planfully considering our next move. (This likely is as due to our approach as players, but Jason's semi-gonzo world seems to invite improvisation.)

The mechanics, other than be flavors of D&D, produce slightly different play styles in an of themselves, on top of the differing focuses. Character motivations and backstories are more important in Jack's game, while humor and farce (not absent from either) comes more to the for in Jason's. Still, I think their are a lot of similarities. Both Jack and Jason are experienced gamemasters with a strong sense of their own style and a handle on the world's they are presenting. Both of them present an intricate backdrop with factions, locales, and other bits of depth, but they sit back and let the player's choose what they want to approach.

Of course, the enjoyment I get out of these two games doesn't come solely from the GMs. Both of them have a good, involved group of players (which seems to be the exception rather than the rule when drawing from the player/gm/creators of the G+ community). The give and take between the two is probably as important as anything else.

Hubris Arrives

I was going to title this post "The Hubris of Mike Evans," but that would be a title for a negative review--and this ain't one of those. On the heels of the successful Kickstarter, I mentioned some cool highlights from my read-through of the early backers copy, but I figured with it available to everyone, I figured it was a good time to do another walkthrough.

Mike subtitles his work "a world of visceral adventure" and everything in here works to support that tone. It is, after all, a world made from the "fetid corpse of a dead god." Mike uses the Dungeon Crawl Classics ruleset which (to my mind) is sort of blacklight poster/70s comic sword & sorcery. It's a good fit, but Mike twists it into a "90s comic by Danzig with art by Simon Bisley" sort of direction. Mike's world-building is aided and abetted in this regard by the art work which includes stuff by Jeremy Duncan and Doug Kovacs, among several other worthies. This group knows how to draw weird shit and monsters.

So the tone is consistent, but what do we actually get? There are nine new classes and races; things like a Blood Witch (a bit like Last Airbender's blood benders but way more EVIL!) and the Murder Machine (Warforged but with the Metal turned to 11). There are new magic items and new spells, all table-ready and (in case of the spells) detailed in full DCC style.

A big section is the "Territories of Hubris" chapter. This is the sort of thing that bogs down a lot of setting books, but Hubris focuses on the interesting bits, so little wordage is wasted and it is surprisingly usable with little prep.

There is a grab-bag of tools and generators, some of the them sort of random (you know what I mean), but great utilities with some flavorful results. This section shows the influence of products like Vornheim.

Finally, there is not one but two short adventures, one of which is a zero level funnel. This is really useful in making the setting come to life because it shows how the writer does it. It's the sort of thing a lot of single-author setting books would do well to emulate.

If any of that sounds cool to you, you should really check Hubris out. On sale now!

Baroque Space Troika! Style

Reading over Daniel Sell's rules for Troika! Basic, and I am utterly charmed. I wrote up some backgrounds for Baroque Space using the ruleset. It's a great way to get really setting-appropriately flavored characters easy:

BLEMMYE (ACEPHALOID)
You are a squat, muscular savage, belligerent and possibly anthropophagous, with a face on your torso.

Possessions
War club
Filed teeth (damage as knife)
Fetish or Talisman

Skills
6 Language (their own savage tongue)
2 Awareness
3 Club Fighting
2 Strength
1 Tracking
2 Wrestling

BROTHER OF THE BELT
You are a buccaneer of that rebel society of the asteroids, who find fraternity among thieves adhering to a simple code: No member may  rob or cheat another, loot must be apportioned by established rules, and no captain may command without being elected by the crew.

Possessions
Cutlass
Mechanical eye, hidden mostly behind a patch, but capable of scuttling ambulation on unfolding limbs. It can record what it seems for 15 minutes and relay it upon reinsertion.
Pistol
breathing-dress (counts as modest armor)

Skills
2 Astrology
3 Climbing
2 Pilot
2 Sword Fighting
2 Pistol Fighting

GAMESTER

You are an inveterate gambler, late of the Jovial gaming houses.

Possessions

Deck of Marked Cards

Dueling Pistol of overly elaborate design 

Jovian Dice (d6, in various kaleidoscopic Neoplatonic solids)

Non-Euclidean Laputan Habiliments

Skills

2 Awareness

2 Etiquette

1 Evaluate

1 Sleight of Hand

2 Pistol Fighting

3 Secret Signs - Tells

LUNAR CASTAWAY

You have been recently rescued from the silvery Lunar wastes where you were long marooned.

Possessions

Antique Musket

Fantastical yet rustic clothing

Journal and writing implement

Semi-transparent body owing to long subsistence on Lunar fruit

Skills

3 Awareness 

2 Language - Selenite telepathy

1 Musket Fighting

2 Run

2 Tracking

MERCURIAN COURTIER

What is there in life for you now that you have been compelled to flee the shining court of His Heliocephaliac Majesty, Helios XXIII, Emperor of Mercury? The other worlds are so cold! Still you persevere. 

Possessions

Mercurian Court Fashion: powdered whig, cache-sexe, corset, jabot or a doublet, pantaloons, stockings, and heels --and a mantled cloak.

Mercurian shaded lens on a stick OR goggles

Light-blocking ointment

Muff Pistol

Stiletto

Skills

3 Etiquette

2 Gambling

3 Language - Mercurian

1 Knife Fighting

2 Pistol Fighting

RUDE MECHANICAL

You are a Mechanical android. Glimpses of variegated lights blinking through the crack in your brazen skull tell the tale: You are malfunctioning and masterless, certainly, but also possibly possessed of radical political views.

Skills

2 in a weapon or improvised weapon of choice

3 in a skill related to your primary function (Etiquette, Mathmology, Evaluate, Craft Skill, etc.)

2 in a Language of choice

1 Strength

1 Run

Possessions

Repair kit

Weapon or improvised weapon of choice

Special

Mechanicals do not heal like natural folk, but must spend an evening in repair. For each hour of rest with access to repair tools regain 3 Stamina.

You always have the equivalent of light armor.

SPACE COOK

You are a veteran of many voyages and an essential member of any astronef crew. It is often no mean feat to wring something edible from the bounty of the spontaneous generation vats, and occasionally, you succeed.

Possessions

Bottle of rotgut

Cleaver

Pistol

Vials of salt and various exotic spices

Venerian Jabbering Monkey 

Skills

1 Awareness

2 Cooking

1 Strength

2 Axe (Cleaver) Fighting

2 Pistol Fighting

2 Fist Fighting

Wednesday Comics: Cosmic Tales

Storm will resume next week, after the holiday. Today, I want to point you (again) to a webcomic done by Mike "Aos" Gibbons: Cosmic Tales. It's got a Bronze Age charm that you will dig if you dig Bronze Age comics, and if you don't you haven't been paying attention to my comics posts over the years. Check it out.

Christmas Comes Early

In line with the Christmas decorations already up in many a retail establishment, Action Lab has released the Christmas comic Northstars Vol 1: Welcome to Snowville on Comixology. it will be out in hardcopy later this month, I believe. This kids comic (something of an homage to those TV Christmas Specials and Harvey Comics of yore) is written by my friend, sometime collaborator, and fellow rpger, Jim Shelley and his daughter, Haigen. Art is supplied by the very talented Anna Liisa Jones who I would love to have do something for the Land of Azurth one day.

Here's one of the character designs: