19th Level

I have a special place in my gaming heart for early editions of D&D. I'm not quite enough of a grognard to have played the original D&D when it came out - my gaming career began in the early 1980s. I played a lot of the Basic and Expert D&D incarnation as well as a ton of Advanced D&D. But they didn't quite make it this high in the list. One of the things I loved about the Companion rules of D&D was the way it brought about domain play. Early in this list I had Pendragon as a game I really like but didn't get a lot of time playing. I really like the idea of PCs ruling domains. It's a reason I greatly enjoy George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. But there were a few frustrations I had with D&D. I liked the idea  of demi-humans having their race as their class - it added a certain amount of character - but I also found it a bit limiting. When I played, I liked being a magic-user but I was frustrated by the limits of low-level mag...

I was never able to get a copy of the Traveller RPG as a kid. The local hobby shop, long since departed, had the Traveller books, but I never knew where to start. I saw little black books -  Books starting with 4, Supplements, etc. But I never knew where to get the first three books.  My first science fiction RPG was Gamma World  but shortly after it I obtained Star Frontiers . Gamma World scared me a little bit. This was the early and mid 1980s. It was a time when nuclear war didn't seem all that unlikely a possibility. Yes, Gamma World  was over the top and wild, but the setting of a fallen Earth always made me feel a little down. Star Frontiers , on the other hand, was something I could get into. Gleaming towers, hover cars, laser pistols etc.  Let's talk a little about the setting of Star Frontiers. It takes place in the "Frontier", a region close to the center of the galaxy where four species have come together to form the United Planetary ...

With a two week break between classes at Brandeis, I had a little bit of time to goof off and make use of the PS4 I received as a birthday gift last month. I finally made my way through Naughty Dog's The Last of Us . This isn't really a review of the game, there's about a gazillion out there on the internet - though I will give a brief overview of it. I'll also note there are spoilers about the game in this post so if you've not played it and want to play it unspoiled, you should read no farther. A bit unlikely for a game released in 2013, but just in case... The Last of Us tells the tale of Joel and Ellie in a post-apocalyptic world. Joel is a survivor of the original outbreak in his late forties. Ellie is 14 and for unknown reasons, is immune to the infection. In September of 2013 a mutant Cordyceps fungus wipes out civilization.  Cordyceps is a real kind of fungus and is a parasite, with some species able to alter the host's behavior. Luckily for us, ...

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 ...

When I first starting playing D&D in the 1980s, Charisma was the most common dump stat. We pretty much ignored the rules on hirelings and henchmen. From what I've read online, our experience was not unique. However, I've also seen for many groups henchmen were an important component of the early game and the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide bears this out, with considerable space dedicated to the acquisition and loyalty of henchmen. In our AS&SH game, one of the players had two characters, both of whom had high Charisma scores. He decided to use some of his starting cash to hire some mercenaries. It wound up being an extremely good investment - giving the party additional firepower while at the same time giving the monsters additional targets to aim for. I suspect should the henchmen survive up to the point where the characters make it to second level, I might allow the henchmen to gain a little bit of experience and reach 1st level, with an eye towards al...

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...

I remember being so excited in 1984 when the D&D Companion Set  at last came out. I'd been promised it for years. Well it wasn't really that long, given it was first promised in 1981 with the then-current editions of the Basic and Expert rules. That's less time than some Kickstarters are overdue... One thing I really liked was the idea that PCs could rule their own domains. Of course it provided me with quite the education in feudalism as a result, a nice supplement to my middle school social studies classes. There have been a few OSR games and supplements devoted strongly to such ideas. It's baked into Autarch's ACKS and Sine Nomine's An Echo, Resounding . ACKS is its own B/X-based RPG with a ton of detail about building domains.  An Echo, Resounding is a supplement for Labyrinth Lord and other OSR games - it's quite a bit lighter than ACKS . I find it a bit interesting is that domain play tends to be the province of high-level characters. From ...

One thing I've enjoyed in the OSR is how it's allowed fresh looks at the games many people first picked up in the 1970s and 1980s, taking those games in directions that were, at best, rarely explored in their original era. Probably the innovation I've enjoyed the most is the emergence of products to support sandbox play. It's one thing to advise a GM to let the players wander the "map" freely. However, that isn't always all that easy in practice. Enter a number of products designed to support free ranging players. Companies like Sine Nomine Publishing, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Autarch, and many others have all released products designed to give a GM tools for such adventures. Now that I think of it, this has even entered more "modern" style games. For example, The One Ring  and Adventures in Middle Earth  both have tools for wilderness adventure that have that old school hex crawl feel to them. Old school D&D style games ha...

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,...

DM: "Black Dougal, you find out that you missed a tiny discolored needle in the latch. Roll a saving throw vs. Poison, please!"  Dougal (rolling): "Missed it!"  DM: "Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor. He looks dead."  Fredrik: "I'm grabbing his pack to carry treasure in."  Rebecca: "I'm giving Black Dougal the last rites of my church." - D&D Basic Rules, 1981, p. B59. As an older gamer, I tend to like a lot of aspects of the Old School Renaissance. As I began having children, discovered that spending a lot of time balancing encounters, making sure I gave out just the right amount of treasure, calculated stats properly, etc. was not how I wanted to spend my time. Indeed, I often didn't have the time. It really made me appreciate many of the tropes from the beginning of the RPG hobby. That's not to say I don't enjoy new-fangled stuff. I'm enjoying running a Fate Acceler...