Recent Acquisitions

With my most recent attempt to run a session of the Demon Verge campaign derailed by a post-vacation cold, I find myself once more with little to discuss in terms of actual play.

Instead, here are some brief thoughts on a few RPG-related products I've picked up recently. I hesitate to call them "reviews", since I haven't used (or, in many cases, even finished reading) the books in question. But here goes anyway:

Uresia: Grave of Heaven. S. John Ross' fantasy setting has been around for a while now, having had versions released for the now-defunct Big Eyes, Small Mouth system as well as d20. It's currently available via Lulu as a system-free setting resource, in a variety of formats. Since Lulu recently had a substantial sale, I opted for the "Stupid-Expensive HyperDeluxe Omnibus", and it's an extremely attractive book. The fact that Uresia was originally made for an "anime RPG" (whatever that means) means that there's a good deal of well-executed artwork in that style, but there are also more realistic (and more cartoonish!) drawings, a mix which I guess might bother people that place a lot of value on a "unified feel". The setting itself is breezy and whimsical, with an emphasis placed on fun and gameable locations. Ross has a playful sense of humor that only occasionally grates on me -- there are a lot of pirate jokes in here -- and a high percentage of interesting ideas per page. My increasing appreciation for goofy stuff in dungeon fantasy means that Uresia hits what is currently a sweet spot for me. I'm happy I bought it.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment. More weirdo dungeon stuff from Lulu, this time specifically for old-style D&D, with a post-apocalyptic take on fantasy that reminds me of Thundarr the Barbarian and Korgoth of Barbaria. I've been re-warming to the idea of megadungeons lately, and ASE certainly qualifies as one of those. I haven't read much of the dungeon itself yet, but I'm very impressed with Patrick Wetmore's wacky wizard-blasted sci-fantasy setting and the new D&D-compatible classes -- including robots and scientists -- that he's introduced to reflect it.

Qelong. I haven't read this yet. Despite my respect for Lamentations of the Flame Princess' dedication to publishing good-looking, OSR-friendly gaming material, I've never been a big fan of horror, and so I often find that their products aren't my cup of tea. However, Qelong is written by Kenneth Hite, an author I've heard good things about (but have never personally read), and the idea of a Southeast Asian-inspired fantasy sandbox is intriguing. It also comes highly recommended by people whose opinion I value. On the other hand, the back cover blurb references two movies I wasn't a huge fan of, so... we shall see, I suppose.

(Note: I finished reading Qelong since I wrote this post. It's quite well-written and full of interesting ideas, but ultimately, it's a quintessential Lamentations scenario, with lots of nightmarish magic and bodily horror. It's a great book if that's your thing, but it's not really mine. To me, the old WarGames saw of "the only winning move is not to play" seems to apply to a lot of the Lamentations adventures.)

Judge Not

Over the past couple of days I've been sitting down with my copy of DragonRaid, with the intent of reviewing a game I've been talking about since I started Dungeonskull Mountain. I had every intention of giving the game a fair shake, but I'm afraid I can't.

As I've mentioned before, DragonRaid does have some admirable qualities. It is presented in a very attractive, colorful box with excellent production values. It contains some interesting ideas, like having characters' combat statistics be based on the "Armor of God" passage in Ephesians, or a magic system that uses memorization of Scripture for its core mechanic.

Unfortunately, I simply can't make myself objectively review a game like DragonRaid. This is a game that puts a race that does good deeds "for the sake of helping people, rather than for the glory of the OverLord [Jesus]" in the monster section. A game where creatures on the heroic side are called "Victims". A game where the idea of recreation is portrayed as sinful in the introductory book.

I hope nobody thinks my own atheism is overly coloring my opinion, but this game... this is not my kind of game.

I will leave it at that.

Review: Ultimate Toolbox

I am a big fan of random rolling. Don't get me wrong: I like making stuff up whole-cloth as much as the next guy, but if there's one thing that I've learned over my years of gaming, it's that rolling randomly often gives me fun results that I never would have come up with on my own.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I jumped on AEG's new supplement, Ultimate Toolbox, as soon as I learned it was available. The back cover blurb describes it as "400 pages of the best charts, tables, and seeds of gaming adventure." It's a massive expansion of their well-received Toolbox sourcebook, released for the d20 system several years back. Ultimate Toolbox cleans that product up, removes the d20 gaming statistics, and adds a whole lot more random tables.

As can probably be gleaned from the book's cover, which appears to depict a cleric of the new default D&D death goddess, the Raven Queen, Ultimate Toolbox is still aimed at those running and playing D&D-style fantasy. The book organizes its charts into seven chapters: Character, World, Civilization, Maritime, Dungeon, Magic, and Plot. Each chapter contains around one to two hundred d20 charts that can be used to generate a bewildering variety of useful information that one might need to produce on the fly (or any time inspiration is needed). Here are some sample tables that I've randomly flipped to:

• Druidic Orders (Character chapter)
• National Calamities, Magical (World chapter)
• Power Behind the Throne (Civilization chapter)
• Ship Names (Maritime chapter)
• Potion Tastes 2 (Dungeon chapter)
• Command Words, Healing (Magic chapter)
• Gossip About a Group/Guild (Plot chapter)

Naturally, the real question here is "how good is the stuff you can roll up?" Well, they're generally pretty good. Results can be dull ("Ranger" under Ranger Titles), anachronistic ("Bring it on!" under Battle Cries 1), ornate ("Scarlands of the Bladed Earth" under Desert Names), or inspired ("Pretty wife of an ugly man said to be magically animated statue" under Local Legends 1). There is a lot of material here I would probably never use, but I think the point of this book is to help you out when something you thought would never come up in your game suddenly does. I found that the World and Plot chapters, especially, would be useful if one needs to whip up an adventure background when their player characters elect to wander off the map.

As far as drawbacks, there are a few. Ultimate Toolbox is a project that likely exhausted its authors, and while most of the results you can roll up are pretty interesting, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes you can roll up a dud. This is probably inevitable when you have three people creating over 700 charts, but it should be mentioned. Also, as in many RPG products, I noticed quite a few typos that easily would have been caught with even a simple spell check - "steppe" is consistently misspelled as "steepe", for example. If you're a person who likes a book packed with glossy artwork, look elsewhere - there are a few pen and ink illustrations here and there, but nothing that will knock your socks off. Finally, the book is pricey - $49.95 for a black-and-white softcover.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I picked up Ultimate Toolbox. It isn't perfect, but it does deliver what it promises: piles and piles of random tables. If you're the type of gamer that enjoys such things, as I am, it's a purchase worth considering.

Buckling Bookshelf

My 32nd birthday came and went a couple of weeks ago. I got a ton of loot, thanks to my lovely wife (and a few gift cards from other people), as follows:

• A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, which is something of a dry read, but thus far seems to do a bang-up job of emulating George R. R. Martin's brutal, intrigue-ridden fantasy series. I am especially impressed with the game's focus on players sharing and running their own noble house. Shame about the errata, of which there are many.


• Career Compendium for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 2nd Edition. I've only given this a quick glance-through, but it's definitely nice to have all the careers from all the books (plus a few new ones) together in one place. I do like the added notes on the different careers' places in the Old World. So far FFG seems to be doing a solid job with WFRP2.


• Talisman Revised 4th Edition and The Reaper Expansion, also from FFG. I played a lot of the previous edition of Talisman, and was lucky enough to give the new version a try this past weekend. I'm happy to report it's easily as good as the old game, with some interesting tweaks, and is physically a much sturdier, more polished product than it was in the past. I intend to pick up the next expansion, The Dungeon. (Anybody want to buy my 3rd edition stuff?)


• The Elven Crystals. This is another very good revision of old adventure material for Dragon Warriors, with clearer maps than Magnum Opus' previous adventure book, Sleeping Gods. The original adventure felt wackier and more high-magic than what the rules implied, but Adrian Bott did a great job of making it all feel a bit more logical and grounded.

I also have a ton of stuff on its way in the mail, all gotten on the cheap:

• Arcane Power. I'm playing a wizard in D&D 4e and am looking foward to revamping him - I'm already leaning towards getting a tome implement and a familiar. (Do you care? No.)


• AD&D 1st Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. I have owned the former in the past and wasn't that taken with it, but it came in a bundle with the latter, which I'm told I must own, so let's see what it's like.


• D&D Basic Rulebook and Expert Rulebook. These are the Moldvay/Cook versions; another case of "let's see what the big deal is".


• Lords of Creation. Another Moldvay-penned RPG. I've owned this one before, but sold it when I was hard up for cash. I'm looking foward to reacquainting myself with it, especially since I could hardly figure out what the heck it was about the first time I owned the boxed set.


• Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All, an early-80s British fantasy RPG notorious for giving stats for Jehovah, Satan, Jesus, etc. It seems this was available from a book-of-the-month club at some point, which means used bookstores are overflowing with cheap copies. Still, it apparently does contain reference information about the medieval world and lots of folkloric monsters, and has been cited by more than a few as a useful resource for Dragon Warriors.

Good thing I just made some room on the bookshelves.

Prismacolor D&D

I recently re-acquired a copy of The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album, something one of my older siblings owned when I was but a wee tyke. I bought it mostly for nostalgia purposes (well, that and the fact that the artwork is pretty great), but it's actually ended up being a worthwhile purchase for other reasons.

The Coloring Album (I guess "coloring book" sounded too kiddy) contains more than well-rendered images to fill in. There's a prose story written by Gary Gygax, linking all the pictures together, and while it's not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, it does grant some insight into Gygax's vision of the AD&D game, circa 1979.

Some of the elements of the book that I found interesting:

• The party of adventurers that heads into "the ruined castle keep" is big. At least a dozen people, probably more like twenty, including a magic-user, a cleric, a ton of dwarves, and more than one halfling thief. This is way beyond even the hireling-heavy, exploration-based adventures I've played in my (very limited) "old school" D&D experience.
• The motivation for their sortie into the keep is greed, plain and simple. There is no mention of stopping an evil overlord, rescuing a princess, or anything noble like that. They're just looking to get real paid. (In the end, it turns out that they've been manipulated by a ki-rin into removing a big nasty from the world, but that's beside the point.)
• The adventurers get their asses kicked a lot. Before they even get to the dungeon, a couple of people get killed by a bulette, and that's just for starters. There's a lot of screaming and dying in this coloring book, and it seems like the poor dwarves - like Ergwhi, pictured above - get the worst of it. Gary might have never used miniatures, but he sure hated miniature people.
• The party runs away a lot, or uses spells and magic items to avoid combat entirely. In fact, they don't really win a single encounter, if by "win" you mean "kill all the bad guys and take their stuff."
• Practically everybody has an awesome beard and/or mustache, elves and halflings excluded. Also, halflings don't look like hobbits here - they're skinny little guys with pointy noses, pointy ears, and pointy shoes.
• A female ranger is apparently called a "rangeress".

Oddly enough, I think the Coloring Album might be the best encapsulation of an "old school" D&D adventure ever made. It certainly gives a more accurate glimpse of the game than any of TSR's novels ever did.

Review: Dragon Warriors

A couple of posts back, I promised a review of an old RPG I was happy to see back on the shelves. That game is the classic British fantasy game known as Dragon Warriors, recently re-edited, re-packaged, and re-released late last year by James Wallis' Magnum Opus Press.

(I should warn readers that I find talking about game mechanics at length incredibly boring. If you're interested in the particulars of how swinging a sword or casting a spell works in Dragon Warriors, I recommend perusing the reviews section at RPG.net.)

Dragon Warriors originally saw life as a series of six digest-sized paperbacks released by UK-based publisher Corgi Books. Dragon Warriors appeared in the mid-80s, as gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf were at the height of their popularity. Dragon Warriors, unlike those books, was a full-fledged RPG, rather than a "choose your own adventure" style game. It enjoyed a good amount of success in Britain (and also in Australia and New Zealand), but the books were unavailable in the United States. Magnum Opus Press recently collected all of the rules and setting material from across the six original books, did a little bit of editing and tweaking, added new artwork, and re-released the game. This new version of Dragon Warriors has been distributed worldwide. So, while many outside the US view Dragon Warriors with a fond sense of nostalgia, the vast majority of Americans are now reading it for the first time.

I have described Dragon Warriors in the past as the UK's answer to "red box" D&D, the introductory version released by TSR in the early 80s, but now that all of the rules and world information has been collected from across the various original books, a better point of comparison would probably be the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, a book that has largely become accepted as the definitive one-book fantasy RPG. But what makes Dragon Warriors shine in comparison to it is its attention to mood and atmosphere.

The game's introduction, written by co-creator Dave Morris, describes the goal of Dragon Warriors as putting "something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing." Morris relates that he and Oliver Johnson wanted to create a vivid, folkloric Dark Ages setting in contrast to "the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons and Dragons."





In that goal, Dragon Warriors succeeds admirably. Even the brief example of play at the beginning of the book - which, in a nice touch, consists of several knights meeting and getting into a discussion about tourneys, the Crusades, and pagan gods - labors to set the tone of the game even as it discusses the most basic nuts and bolts of roleplaying.

Character generation likewise evokes the tone of the setting. Unlike the bulk of fantasy RPGs, there are no races to choose from - all player characters are assumed to be human. (As Dave Morris writes in his introduction: "Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.") Dragon Warriors also eschews D&D's generalized character classes in favor of more flavorful professions - so, rather than fighters, thieves, and magic-users, DW characters are assumed to be Knights looking for something to do after returning from a Crusade, Assassins on the run from secret societies, left-handed Sorcerers feared by the peasantry, and so on. The magic spells and artifacts available to players also evoke a world with history. Yes, there are the fantasy staples of magical swords and bolts of fire, but also terrible curses and saints' relics.

But I don't want to make Dragon Warriors sound like a "historical" fantasy game. The Lands of Legend are clearly inspired by medieval Earth, with some regions essentially being real-world locations renamed (such as the assumed starting point of Ellesland, which is much like medieval England). However, there are also high-fantasy elements, such as the blasted plains of Krarth, ruled by the descendants of powerful magi, or the bizarre bridge-city of Rathurbosk. But throughout is a feeling of deep mystery. Never do the setting's creators let magic seem everyday or predictable. This is a world where magic is old and terrifying. This is Legend, where a goblin is something that lives in your rafters and curdles your milk, an elf is as unpredictable and cruel as a child, and a dragon is the very symbol of evil... and this is a game that dearly makes you want to play in that world.


I should point out that Dragon Warriors is over twenty years old, and while its system is simple and straightforward, there are some odd warts here and there. There is something approaching a "unified mechanic", where one rolls under a target number on a d20... unless you're using magic, when you use 2d10, plus there are a few "special case" rules that work quite differently (such as poison, morale or the dreaded Fear Attack). The abilities of the professions themselves - which include the aforementioned Knight, Assassin, and Sorcerer, plus Barbarians, Mystics, Elementalists, and Warlocks - vary considerably in complexity and customizability. The description of the Barbarian, for example, takes up scarcely a page, while eight pages are devoted to the highly mutable Assassin profession. This may rankle fans of modern RPGs, as some professions certainly offer less options to the player, though they aren't necessarily weaker for it. Again, however, I feel that the game's strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses.

Happily, the new incarnation of Dragon Warriors seems to be doing well for itself. There has been a steady stream of interest in the game on various RPG message boards, and it has received glowing praise from Mike Mearls, co-designer of the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I am optimistic about Dragon Warriors' future, and am hoping that it leads to more old gems being uncovered, polished, and readied for release.