Weview Wednesday - DIY Zenopus vs Sleek Corporate IP Rick

Hey fam! Been off the blogging train for a bit, trying to get my brain in order. Frankly, since the Death of Google Plus and the Great Migration, I haven't been nearly as involved in an online RPG community as I previously was, although I wish that I could be. Working on that, by the way. I'm not great at Twitter, and I find that I piss people off on there who I might otherwise enjoy engaging with, for reasons of privilege and my belief that people give a fuck what I think. The upshot is that I am somewhat heavily invested in my face to face group game, which is typically biweekly. I gave up the reins since I was burning out on DMing all the time, and we drifted from Dungeon Crawl Classics to 5th Edition D&D. I know, I know. Despite my previous proclamations, I will in fact play 5e if there is nothing else going on because a little D&D is good, none is better than bad, and bad D&D is the worst. My DM for this past few weeks has been Eli, a fun roleplayer on the other side of the table and a great DM (all the people in my group are pretty terrific and I value them immensely).

So: I don't pick things to play but I play things. I DO buy things to play, though. One thing i bought is Zach Howard's The Ruined Tower of Zenopus. First, understand that Zach is a bit of a scholar about these things, and I do not believe any person to have more knowledge or research experience in the realm of Holmes-era D&D and early ODnD things. I think that's his schtick; like if you hire a sage then what you get is him. Disclaimer: I know him, sort of, like him and his work, and see him every so often at local regional cons. I think we're related in a long chain of friends who know friends, but I don
't interact with him except online, these days.

Like other people (ahem), even Zach must bow to the blowing of the winds and what he's done here is take a fun scenario, maybe one many people have played, and turned it into a thing that 5th edition players can use as a launching point for a whole campaign. I've not yet played Ghosts of Saltmarsh - and probably never will - but! BUT! If I were, this would be a great way to lead into it. My favorite part of the document is the factions and conversion section which takes the tantalizing bits offered in the original 1977 text and fleshes them out to something on solid ground. This entry-level dungeon can, and should be, perched precariously onto the top of whatever you might desire beneath it. It's a lot like the dungeon beneath the Abbey that was offered in many versions of the DMG as a starting point for gamers - these tutorial dungeons by design leave much to the imagination. Something, I think, that older versions of the game are much, much better at than current versions. The thaumaturge/Keledek can be bested, or go on to become a thorn in the side of player characters for years. The whole place is pregnant with possibility. The adventure is not just a well-written introduction, but a launching point. A not-quite-blank slate for you to play with and make your own. You could pick this up and take it anywhere. And it would be good because it has a strong foundation. Hats off to you, Zach. It shows what love for the source material and an understanding of what the medium can accomplish. What do you get for the price? A literal jumping off point for hours and hours of fun with friends, and of course some tropes that are as warm and comfortable as a bubble-bath. Zach has lovingly taken a 40-odd year old thing and made it readily accessible for current audiences and users of the system. Not much to steal, since they are given to you, and the bones of D&D are literally baked on top of this. A home-base, bandits controlled by evil wizards, winding stairs down into the dark. A respectable and admirable offering. B,B+ for nice layout, heart, and respect and fondness for the source material

Let me offer a counter-example of what I mean, here. 5e seems great on the face of it. Easy to run, easy to hack, easy to leave out burdensome bits. Even says so right in the books, like all good books ought to say. I especially like that they offer many many OPTIONAL rules, variants, and stress time-saving countermeasures for getting bogged-down in rules-buggery. A lot of the PC options seem like they are there for PLAYERS and not DMs to have any thoughts about. What I don't particularly like is that it's a company product , and a brand, and ripe for completist bookshelf pictures. The books are fabulously expensive, too! I remember when I was a kid the TSR hardbounds were expensive but not out of the reach of a teenage guy with a weekend job or access to a lawnmower. Then again, in the 80's our books were in black and white, and these 5e books are beautiful examples of printing technology and material goods.

I picked up this (admittedly clever) monstrosity on a Sunday-night jaunt into Gettysburg. That being the Dungeons and Dragons vs. Rick and Morty boxed set. Well, it's mostly for Rick and Morty fans. I've seen all the seasons on Hulu (so I'm not up to speed), and I like it. It's cleverly written, pretty self-aware, is somewhat nihilistic and awful in a way that even e.g. South Park cannot be. The character of Rick Sanchez is, simply put, reprehensible and the glee with which he tears apart and rebuilds the universe around him (even his dysfunctional family) is part of the appeal of the show. If the Simpsons was about a lovingly dim American family, and South Park and Family Guy are the fast-forwarded products of that, then R&M is the self-hatred and dysfunction and wry awareness of those eras cranked up to 11 and smoking meth. It's interesting that the show highlights that Rick is not just capable of kindness and empathy at times, but he is grotesquely fond of his daughter and his grandson, and although he hurts them over and over in ways that (as a therapist) I find hard to watch, you can see that some part of it is driven by love and kindness (what a critique of our age, eh! more later!)

So, what do you get in the box? Well, a Rick-ified rules manual, mostly lame. The best part about it is the art, and the spell-selection advice from Rick for novice Wizard players. Also, the writer/editor/author-viewpoint of Rick really kicks the shit out of DnD as a bit of a crusty joke not to be take too seriously. Although he has respect for the genre of roleplaying games, much of the text is devoted to explaining that these conventions are mostly absurdities.

The dice are a hot green color - pretty nice for what they are. I haven't tried them yet. The DM screen is terrific - one side covered with absolutely useful information and the other with the clever R&M style box art, which I love, but I probably wouldn't want to stare at it if I wasn't a fan of the show.

The pregens are pretty close to what you might expect, with the caveat that they are sort of tied to R&M characters - the notion being that you are playing Rick's family and a friend playing D&D with Rick as the DM. Meatface, which since I'm not a R&M grognard I can't recall if Meatface is a character in the show or created for this box set. Leading me to the boxed adventure "module".

What do I think? To start with, pretty tediously "self aware", like Rick and Morty's show. Somewhat funny? Yeah, that too. Full of weirdness? Yes, absolutely! There are a few things to steal - in fact I remarked on Twitter some ways back that this isn't a great D&D module for most people who play D&D but it would absolutely make a good module for players of Dungeon Crawl Classics who are (like me) transitioning into D&D5e, because it takes a bunch of tired out tropes and goes out of its way to discard rules and regulations in this regard. Lots of 4th-wall breaking, references to the show, crude teen humor (it's aimed at 13 y/o and up), and roleplay. Highlighting, it seems to me, that you could go through this whole thing and not have a combat round at all until the end (in my mind a mark of almost-quality) and that it's written to appeal to a couple of different kinds of gamers (like 5e, broadly). Most of it will fall flat on you if you're not a fan of the show. But there is a lot to lift. I would probably bring over the Meeseeks box, maybe the Cult of the Buttless, the Ooze Cult, and maybe the Writer's Room encounter. The door to other planes of reality, subtly different than the one you start in, and the reverse trope where the players meet their dopplegangers and are forced to fight them individually. I sort of dig the style of these authors and wouldn't mind seeing what they would do unhindered by the R&M franchise, I guess. There is an encounter with a family of Orcs at what is Orky-Christmas that really throws the tropes of D&D into a stark light, right there in the open and with full knowledge of the authors and (presumably) the people at WoTC who evidently don't take themselves too too seriously. Most of the puzzles are pretty forced, although the one with the undefeatable wizard seems like it would be fun to roleplay. it shows what you can do with a disregard for the rules, and a tired, almost hostile criticism of the source material. B-/C for overuse of the selling-point to the point of weariness, and downright spitefulness of a kind I think is ubiquitous these days

Zach's thing is a couple of bucks. Throw the guy a bone, he's good at what he does and he's part of, if not a bedrock part of, the gaming and blogging community. The R&M thing is more (like maybe 15 times as much!) and if you're not a fan of the show, take a hard pass. If you've got a teen who is into R&M, buy him or her Zach's thing instead. You are, and your young friend is, aware enough to be able to pull off anything in the DnDvsR&M boxed-set and the empty self-hatred that comes in the box won't stain your DM robes.

I'm trying to get my Anchor thing going, and take part in Discord n such. twitter seems a wasteland. I thought about telling Kickstarter to fuck off but there are a great many fun Zines in Zinequest 2, and so I don't know. I backed a couple. I want my friends to be successful. I want us not to turn our hobbies into a side-gig. Does it cheapen us? Cheapen DnD? I don't know. I guess the whole thing is predicated on the purchase of books, to start, yeah. But to wrap this B up, you could get the DnD Basic Rules pdf for nothing, get Zach's Zenopus module for 2 or 3 dollars, find the map at a link and OFF YOU GO. The flipside is for 7 lawns or whatever, teenage me could barely afford the box set of DnDvRnM and I'd be left with wry-dislike and hatred of RPG conventions, a set of dice, and a one-shot that I would never play again that has ties to nothing and nobody else unless you crammed it (and its hefty attitude) into your play. If you leave out the Rick-sposition, it's really a poorly crafted gimmick thing that has been beaten to death over the past 40 years. But aren't they all, at this point?

I don't know, man, I don't know.

PRODUCT REVIEW: TRANSYLVANIAN ADVENTURES

I was excited to see this when it came out, and I remain excited (some years later) at the prospect of it still coming out.

It nicely ties a simple, flexible system in Dungeon Crawl Classics to some relatively light-hearted Hammer Horror flavored PC options, with a juicy pulpy feel in case you were interested in heroics and Ravenloft-oriented play for your group of DCC gamers

The book is a few fundamental alterations to the DCC Luck and death system, a very very complex PC background system, a good handful of character classes, and some hints at greatness. I wish that the author had followed through with hinted plans to expand it into monsters and setting suggestions, and there is a strong hint that the magic system (sadly hanging still in Limbo) would be pretty meaty and different than what we got in the core DCC book. I devoured the whole thing and went to bed pretty late/early with my eyes bleeding profusely and the names of some ancient evils on my lips.

I would purchase this again - I think I left a review on the day it was published to the effect of some layout issues and typos, and its leanness in terms of setting, magic, and monsters were the things that I found wanting.

I still find them wanting, but it did provide me and us (a loose cadre of crack monster-hunters and treasure-oriented scoundrels) with 20 or 30 hours of great fun, so it was money well-spent, I think. It seems to me that it opened up the DCC field for genre-bending in a way that is proving fruitful even today with the release of lots of 3rd party stuff like Black Powder Black Magic and the Neon City stuff.

Spreading the Love Around with some Reviewage and Digressions

I buy a good number of low-cost (but high quality) RPG things every week. I try to limit myself to about 10 to 20 bucks weekly, and usually try to pick up a good deal when I can... I hope I'm not running people out of business with my thrift!

Anyways, I saw mention on one person's blog that there wasn't a review out for his thing yet, and frankly I am amazed since it's all kind of fun. at least on paper.

Just looking at my queue in RPGNow, it appears I have about 666 things to review if I were going to do it right, including a lot of Crawl! stuff, many of the things by Purple Sorcerer and Purple Duck, Goodman Games modules and a wide range of little tiny indy things. I wonder if maybe it must be hard to survive and thrive in this industry because I imagine that each little thing has a niche... You pour your heart and soul into things and it turns out of course the other 4 people in the world who love EXACTLY the same subset of Mechanoid Cowboy Schoolgirls Dungeon RPGs Feminist Narrative Gaming are of course going to buy it but the whole rest of the RPG world is focused on their own stuff.

Alright, here goes (in no particular order) - all the stuff on here came from RPGNow, I think.

Go Fer Yer Gun! by Beyond Belief Games

I was interested in incorporating some Wild West/Frontier elements into my DCC game, in the vein of Spaghetti Westerns.  I'm not sure if this thing was free at the time, but since I picked it up it's gone down to free.  You could do worse than to head over and grab it.  It has some pretty good character classes that fulfill most of the American and Italian Western traditions, and I'm finding with only a little bit of mental gymnastics they could be incorporated into almost any OSR game.  I think they must be based on some version of d20, which makes it pretty easy to drop them into a Flailsnails thing if they are so inclined.  I am having visions of PCs with Colt revolvers mowing down bad guys for a couple of scenarios and then having the tables turned when the cultists hire/incorporate gunslingers into their own crews, gunslingers who happen to be undead or something.  I don't know, Weird West.  The good thing about this work is that it doesn't have any Fantasy or Weird or Steampunk elements on top already, and it has stats in the back for a wide range of real frontier men and women from the American West.  Hey YMMV - it's free.  The production values are pleasingly simple and it's well-made, and the combat is not as wonky as (for example) Boot Hill or GURPS: Wild West or whatever it was...  I like this, and it's too bad these micro-publishers aren't all switched over to a PWYW model, since... I digress again.

Crawl! #9 "The Arwich Grinder" by Daniel Bishop

I try not to gush whenever I read or review something by Daniel Bishop, and the Crawl! series in general is pretty great.  Daniel's practically running the show on a small corner of the DCC universe and it seems he doesn't slow down, or if he does slow down then he must have a backlog of stuff waiting to be published... (note: I think this is actually the case).  Disclosure:  I love H.P. Lovecraft - like many of the people who might read this blog, Ol' Granpa landed on me in my formative years, after I got some references in the Deities and Demigods and found him in my High School library in maybe the 10th grade.  So it goes for many of us, yeah?  This story is so common, and creative people know HPL so well that the popular culture is inundated with Cthulhu references and He Who Sleeps in R'l'yeh A-Waiting is cutesy-fied and belittled and now Mythos elements are creeping up on Primetime TV!  I don't do TV so I can't watch it, but it's for the best since I don't need my Sanity blasted any further.  If I were paranoid, I would say... but anyways I digress.

This funnel adventure draws upon one of my favorite hair-raising Lovecraft stories that doesn't itself contain Mythos elements, and then pops that story into the context of a Weird Fantasy world.  I won't tell you which one, but if you gobbled down lustily all of Lovecraft's works in your youth like I did, I imagine your ears will perk up like mine did in about 5 seconds and your hairs will be on end in short order.  In fact, it appears that Bishop anticipates this and maybe it happened even in playtesting since there is reference to a way to handle stubborn players who won't get with the flow of the fiction...  An attempt to curb a lifetime of player knowledge, probably, in a subsection of the population whose fandom would never allow them to eat something from those generous woodsy folks who never come into town except to buy salt and nitrates.

I think that this'd be a great way to get a funnel group started in a low-magic Weird Fantasy campaign, or even as an interlude in a normal campaign, maybe to set events up for a party of ass-kickers to find what's left of the first group...  The TPK would be satisfying but not a foregone conclusion, although it does appear (on paper) to be pretty dangerous.  I've not played it yet but I found that, like the story it's based on, the more I read, the more I knew for certain what was coming next until the inevitable conclusion hits with a horrendous wet smack, or a dribble of unidentifiable fluid from the rafters above...  This anxious expectation is IMHO the whole hook of this adventure; the wide-eyed grinning certainty and terror that you know for sure what is happening already and that finding the truth is the only inevitable outcome, and maybe if the gods are with you, your hero can put a stop to it...

The art is great and moody, and suitably horrific - even the maps!  I wouldn't probably want my kid to get her hands on it until she's about 13 or 14, but YMMV.  Not for the faint of heart, for sure.

Also, by the way, if you want a hair-raising rendition of the story this adventure is based on, you really can't do better than to listen to THIS on a lonely car-ride home some dark and stormy night. Whatever you do, don't pull over or get hungry while you're listening, or it'll cost you serious Sanity.  I'm not joking, I've read this particular story a thousand thousand times, in fact you could say the copy I own sometimes just falls open to this page, and when I heard this thing on my iPod I almost pissed my pants.

Unlikely Heroes: OSR Races by Nordic Weasel Games

I say this a good deal:  I don't like elves.  Not the ones I see today, anyway; things were different for elves back in the old days.  One thing I like about DCC is that they are given to you mildly different, mechanically (but not by much), and slightly alien.  From the get-go, you're aligned to something else and the normal world doesn't fit you correctly.  This is different from the usual contemporary rendition of elves as this gauzy ubermensch with beautiful hair, THANKS PETER JACKSON.  I may hate Legolas simply because I came up on the Rankin-Bass thing in which the elves really did look alien and unsettlingly different from humans, and not just like supermodels with pointy ears...  Anyway, I digress.

This is geared toward OSR games, and it's ostensibly for people like me, who don't mind Chocolate in their Peanut Butter and Rice Noodles.  OK, bad metaphor, but you'll find in this a Catman, a towering pacifist Rockman Warrior, Werewolves, Bugmen, Skaven-type Ratties, Weird Dwarfs, Androgyne Treepeople, Cosmic Elves, a variety of half-human races, and (most interesting, to my mind) a smattering collection of normal human subtypes.  I haven't incorporated it into my game at all, but I like it on paper, since I went on a Talislanta bender a couple of weeks ago (by the by, all that stuff is free!) in the interests of thinking about class and race differently.  It's pretty reasonably priced, and a good resource for a game that needs something slightly different.  It is well put-together, simple, and clean, with few typos and a scattering of public domain art.  Nothing too out of the ordinary, here, and it highlights that most gamers want bilateral symmetry and roughly humanoid shape in their fantasy RP.  Which reminds me, I need to work on that "WEIRD-ASS ALIEN RACES FOR FANTASY RP" thing, essentially a crib of stuff from Star Frontiers and some other more gonzo sources...  Alas, I have no originality in me, since there is nothing new under the suns.

Shorty Monster's guide to Historical weapons in RPGs by Shortymonster

I don't know, this one kept coming up as a recommendation for me, and the price was right, and then I had it on my wishlist to take a look at.  It's very brief at 12 pages, put together in a simple way, and very informative.  Shortymonster is evidently a history buff, and this is all background and no mechanics.  He has some pictures culled from open sources (I think) and you will think of things differently - particularly the use of two-handed swords and sling bullets - after you read this. It's worth it at the price it's offered at.  And it's good to support a wide range of biodiversity in publishers, I think.  My favorite part?  The information on the Murder Strike and the making of sling bullets.

That's all for now: next review will be The Croaking Fane and the wide range of stuff I've collected for the ASE (not that either of these will need reviews from me, but they are pretty fun)

Some Brief Reviews of Dungeon Crawl Classics (and other) products.

I like to throw some DCC Patrons out every so often, the odd playable race, player aids.  I run a campaign that a couple of folks have played in.  It's fun.  That's what this thing is about, right?  So's I don't turn me and the ladies into paupers, I try to limit my RPG purchases to no more than 10 bucks a week...  It is vexing that there is so much high quality stuff from all corners of the DCC community.

In the interests of spreading around much love and harmony and constructive criticism, and in the hopes that one day others may do the same for me, I offer the following trio of reviews of some really amazing gaming products, shortly (after I get my act together) they will go to the product reviews of RPGNow/DriveThruRPG

My most recent purchase is a threebie (right around 10 bucks, together):

1.Crawl! fanzine #7 by Rev. Dak and the crew - in short, I love this whole run.  I can't get enough.  I only hope that my purchasing of these 'zines one at a time every so often somehow helps keep it (and the good Reverend Dak Ultimak) alive.  Criticals for traps, a nicely evil sword by a loose associate of mine, and some other good stuff.

2. CE04, The Seven Deadly Skills of Sir Amoral the Misbegotten, by Daniel Bishop, Published by Purple Duck Games.  In brief, an excellent adventure with some great hooks and cool moves to incorporate into your campaign.  I haven't ever been disappointed in any purchase I've made that has Mr. Bishop's name in it or on it - he's a quiet, guiding luminary of the DCC community.  The mysterious stone heads are worth the price of admission.

3. SC3, A Gathering of the Marked, by Jon Marr of Purple Sorcerer fame, published under the Purple Sorcerer label.  I love Marr's free works (c'mon, the Funnel Generator is a thing of beauty) and if I had a regular face to face group I would painstakingly make all the little included paper minifigs so that we could use them.  The adventure itself is clever and although I think some would object to linearity (not me), it culminates nicely with a bang.

(I note with some dismay that the first draft of this post sat in the queue quietly awaiting publication and since then I have purchased a couple other things that are almost uniformly awesome)

More later