Attronarch's Athenaeum

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How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox by Robert Conley of Bat in the Attic Games is coming to Kickstarter soon.

This book is a collection of 24 updated and revised articles published by Rob since 2009. It follows a 34-step process for creating a fantasy sandbox that should take around 24 hours to complete.

Rob has four decades of experience playing, running, and designing fantasy sandboxes. His credentials include:

He is currently working on Majestic Fantasy Realms, a spiritual successor to the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

I hope it will be crowdfunded right after How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox!

#News #OSR #Wilderlands

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Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) is coming to Kickstarter on October 24th. It will consist of three books: Revised Rulebook, Judges Journal, and Monstrous Manual.

ACKS II Revised Rulebook will be everything BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia wanted to be.

ACKS II Judges Journal will be the contemporary OSR Dungeon Master's Guide.

ACKS II Monstrous Manual will set the standard for OSR bestiaries.

Here are five reasons why I will back ACKS II on day one:

  1. If you ever read early issues of Dragon Magazine, you have surely spotted various letter and articles proposing various tactics to cheese the game and one-up the Dungeon Master. A lot of Gary's rule modifications were his responses to players attempting to break the game. That's how we went from original Dungeons & Dragons booklets to the legendary Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. We wouldn't have had the game we had, hadn't it been for all the players that tried to break the game. ACKS II went through more than a decade of brutal play-testing. It survived players trying to break dungeons, economies, kingdoms, and planets.
  2. Basic D&D was about dungeon delving, Expert D&D was about wilderness exploration, Companion and Master D&D were about domains, warfare, and rulership. BX/BE procedures held up extremely well, as attested by a deluge of retroclones built on them. I attribute that to all the play-testing these rules were subject to. Domain and war machine rules, on the other hand, were mostly penned by a single man (probably a small team to be honest), and briefly tested. D&D was never known for tight economy. Some try to fix it by introducing the silver standard, i.e. switching all costs from gold piece to silver piece. ACKS II is built ground up to have tightly integrated economy which works. It is based on thorough research of historical data, followed by careful modelling and simulation, followed by playtesting above. “Oh no, is this a spreadsheet simulator?” Only if you want it to! ACKS II summarises everything in gameable tables. You know the numbers work—you can roll and play, being confident in the results given.
  3. Common complaint (lament?) in OSR circles is that player characters rarely go over 10th level, hence a lot of cool higher-level BECMI stuff doesn't get played. ACKS II fixed the problem by building everything from level 1 to 14. There is domain stuff you can play with from level 1; there are warfare rules covering small gangs as well as whole armies; there is something to challenge character of every level and every class.
  4. It evolves and builds on decades of gaming experience. Innovations it brings are firmly in the spirit of TSR's D&D, while fixing many, many small issues. Linear fighters, quadratic wizards? Fixed. Monsters of myth and legend that have very little to do with actual monsters of myth and legend? Fixed. Thieves that suck? Fixed. The list goes on (really, campaign description has 40+ bullet points). And the best part? Everything is presented and explained in such a way a Judge can simply lift part of ACKS II they like and use it.
  5. Because Gary Gygax would've been proud.

I'm very much looking forward to Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint.

#News #ACKS #OSR

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Bard's Gate (Swords & Wizardry)

The Northlands Saga Complete (Swords & Wizardry)

The Monster Overhaul

#Postbox #OSR #SW #FGG

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Wonderful news:

After years of turmoil, the Estate of Gary Gygax was taken over by a court assigned estate manager. As part of the agreement to raise money to secure the debts of the estate, Troll Lord Games was granted the right and privilege to reprint several of Gary Gygax’s works. To wit, The Gygaxian Fantasy World Series, Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh, and The Hermit are each coming back into print.

We hope to bring each of these to you table as soon as possible. Our current plan is to release a Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh retro print immediately. This is a reprint of the book as it was released in 2005. Following this, we will release The Hermit as a Kickstarter campaign. The Hermit will be updated for Castles and Crusades; the Fantasy Roleplaying Game, laid out in full color with new maps and illustrations, contain notes on its development and all original material as well. The Gygaxian Fantasy World Series will be launched on Kickstarter in the first quarter of 2024. The eight plus volume series of works is one of Gary’s prides and joys as well as a treasure trove of information for anyone wanting to create a comprehensive fantasy world setting.

Read the full statement from Troll Lord Games here.

#News #TLG #OSR

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By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization

The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg

The Black Monastery

Quests of Doom

Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms

#Postbox #OSR #SW #ACKS #FGG #Oe

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The creators of Castles & Crusaders are discounting their whole catalogue until end of this week. Although I don't run their system, I use some of the adventures as well as system neutral aids.

Adventures

Supplements

#Sale #TLG #CC #OSR

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25% on many titles. Here are few I'm happy to recommend to all OSR Judges, sorted by publisher. Most of the books bellow are settings and procedures, which makes it easy to take out elements you find interesting and use them in your game.

Arduin

Dave Hargrave was a mad man. A very creative mad man. You might never play Arduin as written, which just like Palladium Fantasy was a bunch of AD&D 1E house rules, but you will walk away inspired like never before.

  • Arduin Trilogy. Compiles Arduin Grimoire Vol 1, 2, and 3. I still use special ability charts presented herein.
  • Arduin II. A first attempt to make a functional, stand-alone game after TSR and Gary turned on anyone who dared hack it.

Palladium Books

Palladium Books is a troubled publisher, but I still have a soft spot for their early fantasy work. Black and white illustrations galore!

Palladium Fantasy RPG 1E

Weapons, Armours and Castles

These are illustrated guides to various weapons, armours, and yes, castles, one might use in their fantasy game. I love thumbing through them for inspiration.

Chaosium

A well known publisher of Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and Pendragon. Although I'm not interested in their rules, I've always been fascinated by Glorantha.

Glorantha

These are all modules from the first edition era. Just how I like them.

Goodman Games

Goodman Games might be best know for their Dungeon Crawl Classic system, but I love their system neutral supplements, as well as opulent re-releases of cherished classics. I like most of the stuff written by Michael Curtis, whom also authored the amazing Stonehell megadungeon.

Modules & Settings

Supplements

Hack & Slash Publishing

Columbia Games

Columbia Games publications don't go on sale so often.

Harn has beautiful, well thought out materials that are usable with many fantasy systems. The maps are gorgeous and personalities are fleshed out just enough to drop them into any world without too much fuss.

Below are select brief supplements I found useful:

Two crunchier, but amazing resources are:

Campion & Clitherow

Weather? Weather! Never worry again. Never.

True Mask Games

Factions? Factions! Never worry again. Never.

Geoffrey McKinney

Seriously, for less than $10 you can get material that will last you a lifetime whenever your players decide to go somewhere you haven't prepared for. As a bonus, below supercharges B1 and B2.

Simon Forster

What, you want more variety than in Mike's dungeon. “Production qualities?” Well then you are in luck, because Simon Forster has written splendid digest-sized books of lairs:

Autarch

Autarch is the publisher of Adventurer Conqueror King System, marvellous system built on B/X chassis. It offers superior take on domain management, race-as-class, functional and tightly integrated economy, and plethora of play-tested options for ambitious Judges and adventurous Players.

Rules

Adventures

All adventures, except Dwimmermount, are set in Auran Empire, which is an ACKS setting. I've found all the adventures superb and easy to adjust (and steal from). AX3 has some great tables for urban dwellings.

Expeditious Retreat Press

The first publisher of OSRIC material. A lot of good stuff, but I picked few of more generic offerings I often use.

#Sale #OSR #Arduin #OSRIC #XRP #Chaosium #RQ #PFRPG #ACKS #GG #DCC #Harn

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Will Mistreta continues collating OSRIC errata.

You can download the latest A4 and letter versions here.

#Resource #OSRIC #ADnD #OSR

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Lamentations of the Flame Princess books are on sale until Tuesday May 16th. Some of my recommendations are:

  • Veins of the Earth
  • Carcosa
  • Isle of the Unknown and Dungeon of the Unknown
  • Broodmother Skyfortress
  • Adventure Anthology
  • The God that Crawls
  • The Monolith beyond Space and Time
  • Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games and Their Modern
  • Staffortonshire Trading Company
  • Rulebooks (pick the free ones as well)

#Sale #OSR #LofTP

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This was a good week for open gaming and TTRPGs.

First Matt Finch released the MGL, then Azora Law finally made ORC public as well.

Notice: comments in this post do not construe legal advice.

Mythmere Games Open License

Mythmere Games has released Mythmere Games Open License.

Quick commentary:

  • Very similar to OGL.
  • Clearer than OGL.
  • Easier to distinguish Open Content.
  • Explicit that one doesn't need to contribute any Open Content even if using other's Open Content. That was already possible under OGL, and in fact was relatively common during d20 days when mostly statblocks were designated as Open Content. I think that is good since it allows more freedom.
  • We finally don't need to do bullshit like “First Edition Compatible” but can flat out say “Compatible with Dungeons & Dragons®” and similar.
  • Cleared instruction regarding notices.

Matt did a point-by-point livestream. Watch the recording here. You can provide feedback to Mythmere via their contact page or email.

Open RPG Creative License

Azora Law, the entity created to steward the Open RPG Creative (ORC) license, released the first public license draft and FAQ:

Quick commentary:

  • Much denser than OGL. Plenty of legalese.
  • Quite comprehensive in its definitions, although still some ambiguity that has to be resolved.
  • Seems to assume all content is Open Content unless stated otherwise.
  • Does not require full license replication in the publication.
  • Attributions are structured similar to the Creative Commons attributions, which I find double edged sword. On one hand it is easy, on the other we are likely to see upstream contributors simply not attributed. For example, let's say we have ten people releasing a monster on their blog and designate it as ORC Content. I gather them into a Bestiary and attribute all of them. Then someone write an adventure and decides to use some of those monsters in their work. They attribute my Bestiary but not necessarily the people who created the monsters (unless I specifically wrote in my attribution how each specific monster should be attributed).
  • I expect a number of people to misattribute works until a good practice forms.

You can provide feedback on ORC License at their Discord.

Current thoughts

Both are better than OGL.

Both seem promising.

At the moment I like MGL slightly more than ORCL.

#News #OGL #MGL #ORC #OSR

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