It's time to write more reviews because that can be diverting for me to do and for you to read (review of Warlock! and Gradient Descent)

I hope you won't mind if I cut right to the chase: this article is going to be a review of two products. Here is product the first:

Yeah, it's Warlock!

If you haunt the front page of DriveThruRPG like I (unfortunately) do, then the Warlock! RPG cannot have escaped your attention during the last year or so. In case you didn't know, it's awesome. I'll rhapsodize below.

Here's the other one:

Gradient Descent for cool-kid Mothership

This one is Gradient Descent, an adventure/setting for the Mothership RPG (which I reviewed earlier along with its first adventure, so check that out). Although it's another hot and sexy RPG that has captured eyeballs and zeitgeist, the situation is a bit different because it's not actually out yet.

Yes, yours truly is an RPG insider. Well, actually, I just backed the Kickstarter and thus got my hands on the early release of the PDF. It's been bouncing around my hard drive for a couple weeks and I just got around to reading it. And you know what? It's a banger, in the parlance of the day.

So if you're just looking for information about what to buy, you can stop there and put there both on your list, especially if you're into old-school British fantasy role-playing (i.e. Warlock!) or space-faring sci-fi horror (i.e. Gradient Descent). They both get my rousing approval, so if that's means anything to you, consider picking them up if you're a tabletop RPG GM.

But if you need to hear more to determine if these are right for you, or you just like to read this sort of thing, then follow beyond the fold.

The Magician's House - a free DCC adventure!

As usual, it's a bit bigger on the inside

Well, here it is: a complete DCC adventure written by yours truly - The Magician's House! I'll let the opening words of the brilliant author do the talking:

The city of Blackrock is in peril!  Demon cultists march inexorably closer, less than a week away from putting its people to the knife.  The Duke puts out a call: brave and resourceful heroes are needed to recover the sacred words that will unleash the power of the Sealing Stone.  Words that have passed beyond the world - and so these adventurers must pass beyond the world, into...The Magician’s House! 

The Magician’s House is designed to challenge the party and delight the players with its whimsy.  Within its enchanted walls, they will find doors that open to strange vistas: faerie gardens, abandoned cities behind the mirror, libraries of boundless size and crystal domes on the moon.  They will encounter beings that interrogate and imperil, beguile and betray, entreat and entertain; children and ogres and aliens and magical statues.

Pre-review: The Dark of Hot Springs Island

Yes, there has been a drought of posts from yours truly.  A long dry season for posts on Artifacts and Relics, as it were.  Listen, when it comes to writing about games, my big priority is making headway on Blackrock.  And it's (surprise!) slow going.  I have to say, writing certain bits is a real drag.  But like some kind of mighty-thewed yawper, I heroically trudge forward.

This is like game writing

But life is not all OSR fantasy adventure setting authoring.  No!  I also read OSR fantasy adventure settings.  You see, I have many interests.

And so this post.  I recently picked up The Dark of Hot Springs Island, and have sort-of read it.  I've basically flipped through it a bunch.  I can't say I've read enough to write a review, but I am comfortable saying I've read enough to write a pre-review, or as some might say, "premature half-ass musings."  So please join me, if you will...

Blackrock!

I'll keep this post brief: I decided to change the name of my adventure setting, as well as the product as a whole.  They are one in the same: Blackrock!

My thousands of loyal readers may recall that Blackrock is the name of a suburb of Punjar in my monthly DCC campaign.  But I came up with that, so I feel justified in repurposing the name.  Not only that, but "Blackrock" is such a perfect name for this project.

A hot commodity?

For one reason, it's thematically appropriate, because the town was once the site of a human basalt mining settlement that was enslaved to giantfolk.  And since I'm now thinking beyond the bounds of the singular heist, calling it "The Cursed Sword" or "The Vault of Blades" just didn't seem appropriate anymore.  In light of that, "Blackrock" is a much better title for the project than "Hoblington."

That's all for now.  I'm still mulling over a candidate for review (there are so many...the addiction continues).

Learning to crawl

I've always loved GMing.  When I was a kid in high school, I was enamored with the prospect of inventing my own imaginative and immersive worlds, and using them to fill my players with wonder.  These days, the emphasis has moved away from the idea of showing off my creativity, and towards a fascination with engaging my players.

There's a certain egotism to the practice of GMing

That isn't to say that I've entirely given up trying to come up with cool stuff. For instance, that DCC adventure I've been working on.  Well, one thing led to another, and the idea has snowballed into something a bit larger.  That doesn't sound good, does it?  An excess of ambition can kill a hobbyist project faster than anything.

The world is my sandbox!

It's been a while since my last post, but that's mostly because I was away on vacation in Europe for two weeks, followed closely by a visit from my mom.  All of that was great, but quite exhausting, and not particularly conducive for writing about my great love for role-playing games.

That doesn't mean that I've been completely idle in the world of elfgames.  Far from it, my friends!  Let's see...so I didn't really do much related to gaming in Europe, although I did plow through Charles Stross' Laundry Files (well, at least the five main books).  I've enjoyed a couple of Stross' other novels (Accelerando and Glasshouse both managed to impress), and even when they have suffered from prioritizing "big ideas" over characters (something I've encountered more in British sci-fi, for some reason), they have been rife with gameable ideas.  

My favorite of the covers

The Laundry Files also has plenty of game-ready ideas (in fact, it's been covered (DriveThru)), and also manages to have some appealing characters and well-paced plotting.  It's certainly not meant to be taken as seriously as some of his other works, but not everything has to be high-art.  And we were talking about elfgames, right?

But that's not all.

Review: The Well of Souls and The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad

This is technically two reviews, since we're talking about two adventures; The Well of Souls is billed as an introductory adventure, and The Vaults of Zadabad is its immediate sequel.  Both are sold by Stormlord Publishing, with both being penned by Carl Bussler, with Eric Hoffman on Treasure Vaults. You can find them on DriveThru, but The Vaults of Zadabad has versions for DCC and Swords and Wizardry.  I have both adventures for DCC, in PDF format, and that's what I'll be reviewing here.

DCC session report - Blackrock Manor #3 and #4

It's been a while since we visited that blasted suburb of Punjar, Blackrock, and its eponymous brothel - although, it should be noted that its owner, mistress Archimedia of...what was the name of her family, anyway?  Anyway, her - she renamed it "Blackrock Manor."  And why not?  It's no less a manor than a brothel.  The reality is neither; it is the rat-infested and rain-sodden guildhouse of a budding adventurer's guild.

That's nothing new, just a bit of a background recap.  Except for the part about the new name.

Anyway, when last we visited our intrepid adventurers, they were emerging into the sun, blinking furiously and too parched to form words.  As they greedily eyed the babbling brook, looking to slake their collective thirst, a peculiar troupe of imps had emerged from the forest path bearing an unconscious priest.  Upon sighting the party, they had laid down their recumbent cleric as a disembodied voice bid them to feast on your flesh.  That's pretty much where we left off.

Irresponsible acquisitions!

This is going to be a short post.  I wanted to mention that I've picked up a few DCC adventures since Journey to the Center of Aereth.  There's been a lot of intriguing materials lately, much of it from DCC publishers Goodman Games.

Let's see what I got...

DCC session report - Blackrock Brothel #2

When last we left our heroes...

In this session of the Blackrock Brothel campaign, we return to our intrepid adventurers as they have reached the bottom of the wizard Nekros' subterranean sanctum, a bizarre scene: at the bottom of a gaping two-mile deep shaft, reached after two days of marching down an interminable staircase, there lies a lake of acid, inhabited by colossal leeches, spanned by a set of narrow circular bridges.  At the central convergence of these bridges there waits a gigantic mound of guano.  This is the home of a wizard, and clearly, the ways of wizards are not the ways of ordinary men.

For this session, the following players were in attendance:

• Stan, in charge of Grognard the Dwarf and Courve the Thief
• Xavier, running with the priest Dar Shasta and Archimedia the Thief
• Steve W., stepping in for Brendan to manage Sizarius the Wizard, and the mighty warrior Greg

In the real world, our session was delayed by about an hour due to connectivity issues, and the need to bring Steve up to speed.  I was worried that this would leave us without enough time to stab things and generally dampen spirits, but once the action got started, my fears were proven groundless.

Writing a DCC adventure

My previous campaign was using my Empress rules, and I was going for something relatively low-magic, or at least a setting where magic is subtle.  I was going for something a little grittier and low-key, with plenty of intensity but not much flash.  That way, I reasoned, it would be all the more exciting and mysterious when characters encounter the supernatural.

Well, I've largely abandoned that approach, for now, and instead embraced the gonzo ethos of Dungeon Crawl Classics.  That doesn't mean I'll never return to a more low-key approach, but I've come to believe that getting players to engage with that kind of material requires a better GM than I am - at least, at this time. I've taken a step back from trying to create everything from scratch, and taking my cues from something undeniably successful.

That said, I haven't given up entirely on creating my own content.  Towards the end of my run with Empress, I had a number of ideas for an adventure, and I think there were some very strong concepts in there.  Long story short - it didn't quite work, in practice.  But I still think there were some great core ideas that I'm not ready to give up on.

So now I'm trying to take what I've learned from DCC, and incorporate it into a new treatment of this adventure.  I'm going to talk about some of my ideas, here, and in future blog posts, I'll probably release bits and pieces of content.

Be warned: if you're one of my players, there will be a lot of spoilers to be found.  You'll ruin some of the fun if you read these posts, so I'll be sure to keep any such material "below the fold."

With that in mind...

DCC session report - Blackrock Brothel #1

The basics

This is the first session report from my new Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign, which I have dubbed the Blackrock Brothel campaign.  The concept behind this campaign is pretty simple: first, we play the funnel adventure Hole in the Sky.  Then, any survivors from that decide to continue together and form an adventuring guild. I told you it was simple.

To get things started, one of the players is a member of a distant branch of a long-declined noble house, and that player, out of the blue, inherits an estate in a suburb of Punjar called Blackrock.  This estate was sold by the family a long time ago as fortunes turned sour, and as the surrounding district also declined, the so did the estate.  In one of its most recent incarnations, it was a brothel in Blackrock, so named because it catered to miners in the nearby basalt quarries.

Once these quarries ran dry, so did Blackrock, and now the estate is in a state of a shocking disrepair, fit only for rats.  The surrounding district is home almost exclusively to bands of squatters and stray dogs, both of whom can be occasional hazards.  The brothel-become-guildhouse has three rooms that a human could comfortably live it, and a heavy safe set into a room on the ground floor.  

In the setup, I tell the inheriting player that not three days after his character (Archimedia the Thief) laid claim to the place, the tax collector showed up with two thugs to demands 50 gp.  When his character protested that she had no money and just showed up, the collector said he would be back within the year, looking for twice that.

Review - Dungeon Crawl Classics #91: Journey to the Center of Aereth

When I read about the appearance of this adventure at this year's Gencon, I was very intrigued.  Right off the bat, the bullet points for Journey to the Center of Aereth sound like a checklist for a no-fail Appendix N extravaganza.  Just check out the blurb:

The stories have reached you: A world beneath our own, lit by a brilliant sun and ruled by sages beyond reproach, where magic has replaced the spoken word, the weakest slave is like unto a superman, and the domes gleam with hammered gold.

You’ve spilled enough blood to know better.

Your trek to discover the truth will take you through endless caverns, ancient causeways and along unknown rivers. An expedition worthy of true explorers, Journey to the Center of Áereth offers characters the adventure of a lifetime – or the means to a quick doom. The Journey awaits!

Did I mention that it's a level four adventure written by Harley Stroh?  I think that last bit is pretty important.  The consensus is that Mr. Stroh's contributions to the latest generation of DCC adventures are brilliant, and the consensus is right on this one.

But what about Journey?  Does it meet these lofty expectations?

Review - Dungeon Crawl Classics #86: The Hole In The Sky

I decided to write up a review of this adventure, because I recently got into a forum conversation about it, and more shockingly, I actually had a chance to run it from start to finish.  How often does that happen?  Anyway, I'll spoil the review from the outset: it was a blast.  

I'll break the review into two sections: a spoil-free recommendation, and GM recommendations.  This way, if you just want to know if you'll like it, without ruining anything, just read the first section.  If you want to know enough to make an informed decision as a GM without regard for spoilers, read the second.  

Preamble complete!