19th Level

I’d originally planned on making this list a “top 10 list”, but given the name of my blog, I couldn’t resist the urge to make it a “top 19”. It’s taking me a bit longer than I would have liked. Unfortunately, over the past few months I’ve had to dial back on my posting frequency. It’s been a combination of finishing up my master’s degree (eight classes down, two to go) as well as actually working on my first gaming product intended for publication (more on that in a few months if it becomes something real). That said, we’ve made it to the top ten. Another of the reasons I expanded it from ten to nineteen is I wanted to get some retroclones that I’ve played in. Today’s entry is one that I’ve really enjoyed - Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorceres of Hyperborea . Take Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and super-emphasize elements that would fit into Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean stories - a swords & sorcery corner of the Cthulhu Mythos. The rules themselves are a close ...

In our Hyperborean campaign I've been adapting the AD&D 1st edition Saltmarsh series for Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea . There's spoilers here for the entire series so if you're unfamiliar with the adventures and have reason to want to stay that way, you might want to hold off reading. Alrighty... So the Saltmarsh series is marked by a series of discoveries: A "haunted" house is being used by smugglers. Those smugglers have been selling weapons to a group of lizard men alarmingly close to Saltmarsh.  The lizard men were kicked out of their original lair by sahuagin. Who also pose a threat to Saltmarsh... The lizard men have been assembling an alliance of aquatic folk against the sahuagin. So how does this fit in Hyperborea? With its long winters, Hyperborea is a horrible place for cold blooded creatures like the lizard men. I posit they must go into a long torpor as their swamps freeze over.  In the current 13-year c...

Based on the TSR adventure of the same name written by Dave J. Browne and Don Turnbull. Tweaked to fit in the Hyperborean setting. Year 576 (Tempest), Month II, Day 26 Cast of characters: Aaron Cèampach, Kelt Warlock Hoom Feethos, Hyberbrean Thief Morrow, Pict Druid Saratos Ochôziakos, Ixian Fighter Sarukê thugatêrOchôziakos, Ixian Witch William "Billy" Welsh - Common Human Pyromancer Henchmen hired by Saratos and Sarukê: Tai, Medium Infantryman Zell, Heavy Infantryman Random tied-up dude found in the upper floor of the house: Ned Shakeshaft, "thief" (or is he?) See also Part One . Peeking their heads up in the attic the adventurers didn't find anything of interest (and in so doing, avoided a nest of stirges hiding up there) and went down to the basement. The basement was a wine cellar, though alas all the bottles and casks were broken. Investigating a dead body, Tai was infested by a rot grub which, despite Billy's py...

I just received my backer PDF for the 2nd edition of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Often when a backer PDF is released I'm playing something else so sometimes it may take days or even weeks until I get around to downloading it. Since I'm actually GM-ing an AS&SH campaign currently, I actually downloaded it right away. I've given the original version of the game a review as well as a more recent actual play impressions . This isn't a full review of the new edition - I've only had time for a quick skim. But from that skim it's worth noting that the game hasn't changed - there's some rearrangement here and there, some tweaks, and a bunch of additions. So it's important to note that my earlier reviews are still very much applicable. Indeed, unlike many games, the fact that this is a new edition isn't even advertised on the cover. This reminds me of the way revisions to the D&D Basic and Expert sets were released ...

Based on the TSR adventure of the same name written by Dave J. Browne and Don Turnbull. Tweaked to fit in the Hyperborean setting. Year 576 (Tempest), Month II, Day 26 Cast of characters: Aaron Cèampach, Kelt Warlock Hoom Feethos, Hyberbrean Thief Morrow, Pict Druid Saratos Ochôziakos, Ixian Fighter Sarukê thugatêrOchôziakos, Ixian Witch William "Billy" Welsh - Common Human Pyromancer Henchmen hired by Saratos and Sarukê: Tai, Medium Infantryman Zell, Heavy Infantryman Zell told his employers about the legend of a haunted house near his hometown of Saltmarsh, a fishing town located about.a day's sail from Kromarium. There might even be a reward from the town council. Seeking adventure, the band traveled to Saltmarsh, a moderately sized town of approximately 2,000. To quote the original adventure... Four miles east of Saltmarsh, just inland of the old coast road and looking out to sea, stands the Haunted House. Until twenty years ago it had b...

Including a character generation session, we had our third session of AS&SH last night. I reviewed it over four years ago but sometimes there's a world of difference between reading a game and playing it. So how does it play? As I've mentioned, as far as the rules go it is in many ways a cleaned up version of AD&D. A bit more complicated than Swords & Wizardry  but nothing anyone with gaming experience would have trouble with. Having played it a few sessions there's a few things that I've noticed in play. First, despite being based on AD&D, the lack of demi-humans makes a big difference, even when you aren't going for deep immersion characterization. It definitely gives off the swords & sorcery vibe that the game is going for. While it lacks multi-classing, it does give some sub-classes that represent a number of fantasy and swords & sorcery tropes. For example, it is possible to play the traditional fighter/magic-user as a warlock. ...

This writeup isn't designed to be a work of fiction, it's primarily an aid to my group to summarize what transpired in our adventure. Based on Jeffrey Talanian's adventure of the same name, which was in turn inspired by HP Lovecraft's short story "The Rats in the Walls". Year 576 (Tempest), Month II, Day 4 Cast of characters: Aaron Cèampach, Kelt Warlock Hoom Feethos, Hyberbrean Thief Morrow, Pict Druid Saratos Ochôziakos, Ixian Fighter Sarukê thugatêrOchôziakos, Ixian Witch William "Billy" Welsh - Common Human Pyromancer Henchmen hired by Saratos and Sarukê: Tai, Medium Infantryman Zell, Heavy Infantryman Our bold adventurers had paid a visit to the dockside tavern of the Silvery Eel in Hyperborea's greatest city, Khromarium. They'd heard it was a place to find adventure - even that the tavern keeper might have work he needed doing. They learned that Xill Vuntos, tavern keeper, was dealing with an unusual rat p...

We'll take this for a spin again in 2017, though I imagine my posts will be a little briefer than last year's given my grad program has shifted its schedule and I'm in the middle of a class this August... Given I've just kicked off an Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea  game that's in one sense my answer - I'm not so flighty as to immediately wishing I was doing something else. I've probably clocked a ton of AD&D in my life so I'm looking forward to playing a game with a setting inspired by my favorite authors (Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, HP Lovecraft, etc.) with some rules based on AD&D. However, let's assume the answer is something I am not not currently playing. I've begun receiving material from the Cthulhu Dark  Kickstarter that I'm really itching to try. To be honest, if I ever have a game with just two players I think I'd whip it out for a one-shot, something Cthulhu Dark seems very well suited...

For the first time in a while my group rolled up some OSR characters as Krom intended, 3d6 assigned in order. We actually did a slight variation - with two characters per PC we rolled four sets of stats with each player picking two. Purple Sorcerer's DCC Character Generation Tools proved handy for this, even with us playing Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea . What I noticed is it led to some interesting choices. I'd grown a bit used to later character generation styles where characters can be optimized fairly perfectly. With this method I'm seeing characters whose prime requisite are not their highest stats. A character with a high Constitution, decent Dexterity, but a mediocre Strength might still be made as a Fighter. First level characters are pretty fragile in OSR games, so it's often best not to get too attached to them. Character generation didn't take too long - not lightning quick, though for all of this these were our first AS...

In preparation for a Hyperborea campaign using Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea  I've been working on getting a more detailed map. I've a bit of lead time as we'll be doing character generation and then some adventuring in Khromarium but at some point I'd like to unleash a bit of hexcrawling. AS&SH has a very nice fold-out map and the upcoming version will have a color one. However, the scale is a bit too small, at 24 miles per hex, to truly facilitate hexcrawling. Most examples of that go for a 6 miles per hex scale. The new version of Hexographer, also named Worldographer, is currently in Beta. I recently purchased a beta of it and have been making use of it to develop my own hex map of Hyperborea. While I generally prefer mapping using Campaign Cartographer 3, Worldographer works very nicely for hex maps. A nice feature of it is it allows for 2 lower levels under the main one. It labels the three layers World, Continent, and Kingdom. ...

It's been a long time since I've made a dungeon map for D&D or similar games. I suspect my copy of Campaign Cartographer was rather sleepy when it got taken for a spin for a dungeon map. I love maps - which in gaming can be a blessing and a curse. I was the kid who tried his hand at making his own track maps of the New York City subway (and making suggestions to my grandfather as to places we should go based on that). So I like maps as entities unto themselves as well as serving as tools - whether in real life or in gaming. In the living room I'm writing this I can see hanging on the walls a 1970's New York City subway map and a map of Colonial-era New York City. When I was a teenager there was a map of the World of Greyhawk hanging up on my wall. That said... my own artistic ability is crap. I've seen some absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn maps that absolutely fill me with envy. I've even supported some cartographers via Patreon. Over the past few ye...

During the Roman Empire, the city of Rome reached a peak population of around a million people. However during the Middle Ages its population dropped to the tens of thousands of people. One source I've seen says 20,000, another 50,000 - in any case, a monumental decline). The Coliseum at one point served as a landfill. I've been thinking about this as I prep for a campaign in Hyperborea. There, the largest city is Khromarium, with a population of around 30,000. However, a reading of the Referee's Manual for AS&SH shows how much Khromarium has fallen from its peak. Depopulated twice - once upon the advent of the Ashen Worm, with Khromarium buried under ice. The second time, in more recent history, in the aftermath of the Green Death. Having once been the capital of the Hyperborean Kingdom - for "untold millennia" I picture it also having once had a population in excess of a million. Reduced to 30,000, that is perhaps 3% of its former glory. Page 208 of...

It's been a while since I've done an old school D&D style campaign. I'm in the process of prepping it, aiming to kick it off some time later this month (or early in the next). We'll be using Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea . AS&SH is awfully close to 1st edition AD&D, at least mechanically. However, there's a number of key differences I'm keeping in mind: The game is closely linked to the Hyperborean setting. This is strongly inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean stories (no real surprise there), with some good does of Robert E. Howard, HP Lovecraft, and Fritz Leiber (among others). It wouldn't be impossible to pull from the setting, but the setting is a great old school setting, one which on its own is very flexible and easily fine-tuneable by the GM. All the characters are human, though there are different human ethnicities or races. Like the Holmes edition of D&D, there are five, not three or nine ...

Revisiting is a strange word, as I've never actually played Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea (AS&SH). I reviewed it several years ago and I liked what I read, though I wound up using ACKS and Dungeon Crawl Classics. It's been a while since I played an OSR game but as I evaluated options for our upcoming game, I found myself coming back to it a lot. There's a new edition of it due within a few months but this new edition is designed to be fully compatible with the first edition. I will confess that I'll miss the boxed set and coil-bound rulebooks but as a backer of the Kickstarter I'm definitely looking forward to it. When I first reviewed AS&SH I wasn't particularly familiar with Clark Ashton Smith. However, over the past several years I've read a number of his works and his writings have had a large influence on my Call of Cthulhu  gaming. The Book of Eibon  had an important role in my campaign as has his creation, Tsathoggua,...

Objectively, of course, there's no such thing. So what's perfect for me? I'm giving it some thought as my gaming group will embarking on an old school campaign this summer. There's a few I'm considering - links go to reviews on this blog.  High up on the list is ACKS - Adventurer Conqueror King . I've had a lot of fun playing it in the past. It's based on what is probably my favorite version of D&D, the old B/X variant, but adds the sort of crunch that I like. It operates on the premise that characters will eventually become movers and shakers in the world, with rules for running domains, thieves' guilds, etc. On the negative side for ACKS advancement takes a while and it does require a bit more prep than most OSR style game. Prep time is something of a premium for me, as after a break of a few months I'll be resuming part-time pursuit of my Master's at Brandeis this July. My own experience is the prep time does yield excellent d...

A new contender for the RPG with the longest name seems to be Astonishing Swordsmen & Swordsmen of Hyperborea , published by North Wind Adventures . I'd faded a bit from keeping an eye on the D&D-like side of gaming for a while after my Dungeon Crawl Classics game fizzled - not that it wasn't a blast but we couldn't get a consistent quorum. Like other games such as Swords & Wizardry, AS&SH clearly has as its starting point original edition D&D. However, unlike many of those games, this is not a slender tome. The boxed set is impressive, dominated by two thick spiral bound books, giving you nearly 500 pages of content. Before I dive into the contents of the books let me give some overall impressions, something I'll return to later. AS&SH feels, to me, like an alternate path of D&D. If you were to take original edition D&D just before AD&D came out and dial up the Conan/Lankhmar influences while dialing down (to almost zero) the T...