It‘s Birthdaychristmas - managed to buy five complete TSR era #adnd boxed sets (#Ravenloft and #Darksun) plus a pile of fragmented setting material on eBay for 170 EUR which is a good price since some of the English language 2nd ed material is hard to come by in Germany. Boxes were sent to my partner‘s flat since I’m in Italy right now. Best thing: my gf recorded a long unboxing video for me, so that curious me could check how complete the treasure was I found on the internet 😍 #osr#ttrpg
@laidbackdm It's the one with the Wind Walkers' Passages: magical passages through a mountain (created by bound earth elementals) where people are turned into air and quickly travel through the mountain. But that was before the volcano blew up, the elementals were released, and several gates to the Nether Planes were opened...
Grim & Perilous RPG? Hold my verkeimtes Dünnbier! ….während ich versuche die Stiefel aus dem Schlamm zu befreien, die ich auf dem Schlachtfeld gefleddert habe. #ZweihänderRPG
wäre ganz sicher was für mich, wenn es mir nicht etwas zu regelschwer daher käme. Ich würde für wfrpg artiges heute eher zu sowas wie Warlock! greifen. Darum #PnpSwap Tausche Zweihänder gegen irgendwas anderes. Gerne classic #dnd oder #Adnd Kram/Module #pnpde
Wo sind hier die Midgardianer? Leben die noch? Kommt raus aus eurem cozy Fantasy Bau. Tausche beide #Midgard5e Bände des Grundregelwerkes (unbespielt) - Kodex und Arkanum - gegen irgendwas anderes: alte #dnd oder #adnd Sachen z.B. oder Midgard3e Krams (M3 = beste Midgard. Fight me!)…irgendwas #pnpde#PnpSwap
Hey #DungeonMagazine fans, I got a notification today from a comic shop that I've ordered from in the past. They have issues 2, 6, 7, and 8 available for really cheap! I already own copies and I'm not looking to flip any of them, so I thought it would be of interest to other collectors and fans:
@gcvsa I like the idea behind 3d6 down the line, to encourage creativity when the dice don’t go your way. But a lot of times my players already have a theme in mind, and nobody wants to suck at what your character is suppose to be good at
@TheDigitalDM Every playgroup needs to decide what method works best for them. Just don't make the mistake of believing that there was ever "one true way", when the history, and Gary Gygax' intentions, are written in black and white ink.
The vast majority of people who have ever played #DnD did not encounter the game before the 1979 DMG was published.
Don't even believe for a second that a straight 3d6 in order method was even commonly used in the 1980s. I can't recall anyone ever using that.
People don’t really differentiate between authors’ voices when discussing roleplaying game scenarios. There’s a bit of it when people are really into it. They will talk about Gygaxian naturalism, or Jaquaysing Xandering dungeons [note check this Alexandrian post regarding the name change]. If it’s a Hickman scenario there’s gonna be railroads. That stuff.
Stephen Bourne is not one of those greats, but I feel like his scenarios have authorial voice dripping from their pages. He has a style. And all his adventures have similar feel that lean into it. He likes to mix heavy medievalism into his scenarios, even the clear fantasy ones, and use a limited palette of monsters for specific purposes.
When it works it’s pretty brilliant, when it doesn’t you feel like you just lost the money you spent.
I especially notice it in his early Role Aids scenarios: he tries to mix historical facts with D&D’s approach to fantasy worlds, and in some places this absolutely doesn’t fit. The Throne of Evil is the worst of the lot, being a weird mix of a political intrigue scenario in medieval England and a bog standard dungeon crawler for early D&D at the same time. A pretty horrid scenario altogether. I know it was supposed to me rules for medieval wargames, but no.
Evil Ruins is much less so, even though I am still bothered by how disjointed the setting is in places. On the one hand he establishes the setting as Castle Tintagel, which is a real world place in Cornwall, and even establishes that it has some connections to Arthurian myth. Then he proceeds to create an elaborate backstory without any obvious ties to Arthurian myth at all, but featuring Saxon kings and vikings. Fair enough.
Maybe I am just not knowledgeable enough about Arthur and his myth cycle.
But then the adventure basically is a generic AD&D scenario, and the maps don’t fit the real world location of Tintagel at all.
It would have been better if he either took care to play into the medieval fantasy situation and actually present it coherently, or just replace all the real world references with some generic fantasy terms. The way it is right now feels disjointed.
Why the hell is there a priest of Zeus in medieval England trying to establish a temple?
Why is Tintagel on the East Coast?
Sigh.
That said, that’s the setting.
I actually always have liked the rest of the scenario, even though, or maybe because… it is incredibly generic. But it is generic in a naive way you just don’t see done that often.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/erbetrayal.pngThe backstory is too long (2pg for a 36 page scenario), but the basic situation is this: there were two brothers born to the same mother, one the son of the king, one the result of an affair with the king’s brother. The first son was supposed to inherit the throne, but when he came back from a journey his brother murdered him and took the throne. Then stuff went belly up, the usurper basically lost the kingdom and established a death cult in the castle (…as you do…), and his murdered brother came back as a wraith out for revenge. So there’s two separate evil forces in the ruins, and the struggle between both comes to a head just at the same time as a bunch of adventurers come to clear out the castle because it keeps the property values down or something.
There’s a bit of subterfuge going on. First the heroes have to travel to the castle with a guide, but he intentionally misleads them for his own goals, and they have to rescue the heart of the forest. Who is a giant spider.
I love that. There are potentially friendly natives in the forest that will gladly help the party, as long as the group doesn’t immediately murder them for just happening to be giant arachnids.
The guide also will steer them towards a different location than they want, so they take care of a lycanthrope for him (not actually a werewolf) while he steals the treasure. The idea is a bit railroady, but ok.
By the way, did you know the term black panther actually refers to two different variants of big cats of different species? I didn’t know until I read this adventure, and then only after I read the statblocks of the lycantrope and his pet leopard properly. The term black panther is never used in the text, but that’s what they both are supposed to be. The text introduces him as a were-leopard. A term that evokes different images in me than black panther would.
I assume the reason for the black panthers in here was because they got the rights for a Boris Vallejo painting for their cover and they needed something in the scenario that fit to that. Or they chose the painting because the were-leopards were in the scenario and missed what color they were supposed to be.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/erenc.pngThen when one finally arrives at the castle one has to deal with death cultists and monsters maddened by the wraith, but it’s not necessarily clear that both are against one another from the outset.
The dungeon is a bit lackluster, but the author took care to put a sort of investigative scenario in there. One can find out the backstory for what happened when following the clues, and find out there is a second evil influence at large. If one cares to do so at least.
The castle itself is presented as a 4 level dungeon, but the 1st level is just the castle yard (also doesn’t seem to resemble the actual Castle Tintagel), and level 4 is rather short.
One interesting bit is that the short boxed text that is given seems to assume the players do indeed not know what these creatures they encounter are. So orcs are “ugly brutes”, hobgoblins are “rather large and ugly creatures” and ghouls are “terrible figures”. Which is nice in that way. It doesn’t give away what they are, one easily could play this as an actual fantastic medieval scenario in a fantasy Britain, and have them all encounter these creatures for the first time.
And that’s actually the way I would run this adventure: as a slightly longer introductory module, to get some people into the game. Maybe not necessarily really in the fantasy Britain environment the module supposes, but one easily could find at least some equivalent region in another world. Or just, you know, keep that little duchy it takes place in it’s own self-contained world.
This scenario was released by Role Aids, a line of supplements by Mayfair games that were more or less compatible with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. There were a few lawsuits involved, but they were rather cheeky about it. This module claims it is suitable for use with ADnD, and the stat blocks are roughly equivalent, but not the same. Certainly enough to run it just like that, mapping to the ADnD rules nearly 1:1.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/erenc2.pngThe illustrations in the text were by Hannah Shapero. I don’t know if she did so much more work in RPGs, but I like the illustrations we get in here. They have a very dark quality, and manage to get over the whole feel of the place perfectly. I am not quite sure if they were actually made for this particular scenario though, or if the author just had to use some illustrations they had lying around.
The first time I came across this scenario was in the German translation. This one was published by Truant Spiele (Truant is the owner’s last name) in 1989 as Ruinen des Schreckens (Ruins of Terror). So at least the title got an improvement. I got it more than ten years after, when Truant and Welt der Spiele decided to get rid of some unsold stock by bundling them together in anthologies. Actually I got that one even later, because it took a few years for me to actually get my hands on it when that anthology ended in the bargain bin.
I find this translation interesting: unlike the original English version this is not compatible with AD&D. The scenario was translated faithfully, but a page about “Universalabenteuer” (generic adventures) was added with adaption notes. All the stats in the scenario have changed to a weird percentile system that does not seem to be directly mapped to anything. Midgard was the first German roleplaying game, and it used a percentile system (it was derived from Empire of the Petal Throne), so that might have been a reason for that. Some characters also have skills that sound very much like Das Schwarze Auge skills from that game’s 2nd edition. What it doesn’t resemble at all is Dungeons and Dragons, which at the time was barely a blip on the German roleplaying market.
Also interesting:
Tolkienesque Ologs were present in the original (as modified orcs), but were replaced with Half-orcs. Very tough Half-Orcs. I wonder why. The other half-orcs come out weaker in comparison, even the supposedly elite guards in the dungeon.
the copyright notice claims this was a translation of Mayfair Games’ Pinnacle, which was another of the scenarios in the anthology I got this from.
"Surprising" because despite the fact that Gary was the person who organized the #dnd / #adnd rules, he was only better at it than Arneson. He was not actually, you know, good at it.
I was thinking again about it seems strange that many of the largest cities in #TheSavageFrontier are found in the northeast, which has the least areas of grassland and should be experiencing by far the harshest winters anywhere in the region.
The only comparable place I could think of would be 13th century Novgorod, and as it happens, both Sundabar and Silverymoon have similar population sizes.
My Sundabar will now be Fantasy Novgorod! That seems like a cool concept.
@Yora It pretty much means fish are going to be on the menu a lot, too. Especially in winter... unless there is a sizeable warm water current running up the coast, keeping things a touch warmer than expected.
@Da_Gut While there seems to be sufficient space to feed the population of the Interior, it's not all exactly in pleasant neighborhoods.
Here I marked the 100 mile radius areas around the castles of the two strongest orc kings, the ancestor shrine of the Blue Bear tribe, and Hellgate Keep, and the hunting grounds of the Elk tribe. 😬
Easy to see why orc and Uthgardt raiders would be a constant fear of humans and dwarves.