Bestiary Cover

Christian N. St. Pierre, the artist who did the covers for the Adventures Dark and Deep™ Players Manual and Game Masters Toolkit, has come through again with the third and final cover in the series. I give you the Bestiary:

The idea for the series of covers was to show a party of adventurers going through the various phases of dungeon exploration; the Players Manual shows them getting ready to face the unknown, the Game Masters Toolkit shows them fighting off hordes of undead to save the sacrifice from the evil high priest, and finally the Bestiary shows them in a final showdown with a pit fiend amidst a vast hoard of treasure.

I cannot recommend Christian's work highly enough to my fellow publishers. 

Read More

Dexcon schedule now up!

The complete schedule of events for this years's Dexcon convention in Morristown, NJ over Independence Day weekend is now up. Lots of really good stuff there, including some old-school stuff (a brief glance showed at least one Expert Rules game on the schedule, and there are doubtless others). I will be running/helping with:

• Friday 2:00 - 8:00: Q0003: "OGRE Macrotures 2013" by Steve Jackson Games. Steve Jackson himself will be there to oversee the festivities!
• Friday 8:00 - Midnight: R0268: Adventures Dark and Deep; "Tomb of the Pirate King" (which will be played on an enormous table featuring 3D terrain from Legendary Realms)
• Saturday 8:00 - Midnight: R0325: Adventures Dark and Deep; "Tomb of the Pirate King" (ditto)

It looks like a light schedule for me, but that Ogre macrotures game is 6 hours long, and I will also be manning my first con booth as a publisher for the duration of the convention, so getting away this long was a bit of work.

If anyone is in the area, I cannot recommend this convention highly enough. They have something for everyone-- old school and new wave indie RPGs, Pathfinder, miniatures, board games, LARPing, computer games, console games... the thing is easily the finest fan-run gaming con I've been to. See you there!

Read More

Vin Diesel on D&D and Riddick

From io9:

I make these movies […] because somebody's paying attention. That's my motto about Hollywood and films, continuing these franchises. There's two lines of thought in Hollywood, one is the audience doesn't give a fuck — excuse me, it's late, I'm in Riddick mode, you're lucky I'm not killing you guys […] Then there's that world-builder, that D&D player that's really meticulous that believes the audience does care and can draw the similarity between Riddick's headdress and the headdress worn by Linus Roache [in Chronicles of Riddick] who reveals in one moment that he is a Furyan that went the wrong path. It's very subtle, but just the fact that you mention it means that it was worth the week-long dialogue about the construction of one little piece of [armor] […]

I haven't board-gamed in a while, and I have people that are asking me to board game. I have a buddy who wrote a beautiful Gary Gygax script. [Dungeons & Dragons creator] Gary Gygax's wife wants me to play him. [laughs] Yeah, I don't get it either. I was like, "Me? I'm Vin Diesel! How do you want me to play it?"

I guess that's cool. I guess some people think of me as a dweeb or something. It's beautiful. I haven't boarded as much as I want to, although friends of mine, like Michelle Rodriguez, she'll say she thinks I DM Hollywood, because I'm able to do these things that are just preposterous, like shoot Riddick.

Read More

Bestiary Art

The prolific group of artists have begun to start sending in the first pieces for the upcoming Adventures Dark and Deep™ Bestiary, and I thought I'd share a few with you all. First up is the giant boring beetle by Chris Letzelter:

And I thought I'd also show you one of the new undead dragon types, the tumulus dragon by John Bingham:

So far with more than 25 of the new pieces received, we're right where I want to be in terms of scheduling, and will (hopefully) be releasing the book in advance of the official March release date.

Read More

Review: Against the Slave Lords

As is well-known by now, Wizards of the Coast has been re-issuing a number of classic books and adventures in suped-up fancy versions, as well as making more and more of its back catalog available in pdf. While this is certainly laudable and speaks to their intention of serving fans of previous versions as well as new versions (doubtless with an eye towards bringing in the former when D&D Next rolls out next year), I've largely skipped the re-issues because I have all the originals, mostly purchased when they first came out.

However, when I heard that WotC was not only reissuing the original A1-4 "Slavers" adventures, but also including a brand-new A0 prequel module, I had to get the book, if only for the sake of completeness.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed.

The new adventure, written by Skip Williams, is A0 "Danger at Darkshelf Quarry". It takes up 23 of the first 28 pages of the book, and seems to be a suitable way to easy the PCs into the machinations of the Slave Lords (although it takes place in southernmost Nyrond, as opposed to the Wild Coast where the other adventures in the series take place). It's designed for characters level 1-3, but given that Slave Pits of the Undercity is for levels 4-7, and I don't really see any way the adventure could jump up PCs 3 or 4 levels, some more intermediate action is probably going to have to be invented by the DM to bridge the gap. One thing I really like is that there's a mocked-up module cover for Darkshelf Quarry on the back card of the book, done up in a similar style to the other four module covers. That was a nice touch.

The rest of the book is given up to the classic series of 4 modules. It's not merely a scan of the original; everything has been retyped and formatted to follow the original, although there are obvious discrepancies between the two in terms of where paragraphs begin and end on the page, etc. The book features the wonderful original art and maps from the 1980's modules, and ends with a gallery of modern fan-art inspired by the series (among whose ranks you'll find several artists who also appear in the Adventures Dark and Deep™ books). They did a very good job of recreating the original look and feel, and all in all this would be a fine way to introduce the classic series to new players.

The back cover card does indicate that the adventures are "Playable with D&D Next rules found at DNDNext.com". However, there are no mechanics for the new version of the game in the book; to use it with the new rules one must download a conversion packet from the website. Even the new adventure is written using the 1st edition rules. I didn't see any module conversion notes in my copy of the latest playtest packet, but I did see a bestiary with D&D Next stats for the various A0-4 monsters (well, A0-5; apparently this month's Dungeon magazine will feature another new adventure, "The Last Slave Lord").

On the whole, I'm very pleased with this book, and will probably want to integrate Darkshelf Quarry into my next Greyhawk campaign.

Read More

Top Five Star Trek Episodes

I happen to be one of the lucky folks who can watch MeTV, and they play the original Star Trek series on Saturday nights. They recently restarted the series from the beginning, and I've been happily ensconced in the first season of my favorite television show ever. I thought I would grace you with my own list of top five Trek episodes; ST:TOS only. I might do an all-Trek top ten list at some later date.

#5 Where no Man has Gone Before (Season 1, 2nd pilot). I love this episode because it has a strong and interesting villain; Gary Mitchell. Gary Lockwood (who would later co-star in 2001: A Space Odyssey) does a terrific job, but it's the slow and subtle betrayal of a friend of many years that really makes this for me. And at the end, when he's in full-blown psychic god mode; "Pray to you? Not to both of you?" "PRAY THAT YOU DIE EASILY!" Terrific.

#4 The Doomsday Machine (Season 2, written by Norman Spinrad). The performance by William Windom as Commodore Decker (apocryphally said to be the father of Captain Decker in ST:TMP) is just fantastic. When Kirk asks him what happened to the crew of the Constellation, and Decker tells him that he beamed them all down to the third planet in the system under attack by the planet killer, and Kirk says, "There is no third planet!" "DON'T YOU THINK I KNOW THAT!? There was! But not any more!" A really great performance, and the music really adds to the tension in this one. Bonus points for Decker playing with the tapes while sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise, just like Captain Queeg with his ball-bearings in The Caine Mutiny.

#3 Who Mourns for Adonais? (Season 2). For me, the last ten minutes of this episode catapult it from a good episode to an "oh my Gods this is amazing" episode. Michael Forrest as Apollo just captures the grief and pathos of the alien god who waited for 3000 years for humans to find him, expecting them to worship him again, only to be rejected. It's incredible to watch.

#2 Balance of Terror (Season 1). A submarine vs. destroyer film in the Trek universe. There's so much more going on here than just one ship hunting another; the play between Stiles and Spock with its undertones of racial prejudice, the (self-aware) parallels between Kirk and the Romulan commander, the unexpected ending where Tomlinson (who we see about to be married at the beginning of the episode) was killed... Just hits all the right notes.

#1 Spock's Brain. (Just kidding.) Space Seed (Season 1). Ricardo Montalban as Khan Noonien Singh. What more do I need to say? It's a brilliant performance, and he created a character that remains event today as the iconic Star Trek villain.

No tribbles? No Mirror, Mirror? No City on the Edge of Forever? No... they're terrific episodes, no doubt about it. But if I limit myself to five, I've got to make cuts, and those just didn't make it. For me, anyway. Of course, everyone has their own thoughts on such things-- what would you put in your top five?

Read More

Monster Books

Since I'm deeply in the final stages of putting together the Adventures Dark and Deep™ Bestiary, I was wondering if there were any OSR-type monster books that I'm missing from my collection.

I've got Malevolent and Benign, Teratic Tome, Tome of Horrors Complete, Varlets & Vermin, and Monsters of Myth. I've got the C&C books Monsters and Treasures and Classic Monsters. I don't have Treasures and Monsters of Aihrde or the three M&ToA supplements; can anyone tell me if they're significantly different than the regular Monsters and Treasures Book?

Please let me know if there's anything of significance I've missed. You can't have enough monsters!

Read More